Parking: thinking logically, are those of us with drives (and who use them) the biggest CFs of all?!

[WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll]

I love a good parking thread as much as anybody, but as I was reading the one the other day (by the man with the upset wife), it got me thinking.

As we all know, nobody has any more right to use the space on the public road in front of their own house than any other driver of a taxed and insured vehicle does. As we always affirm with one MN accord, if you want your own guaranteed space, you have to buy or rent a house with a drive.

HOWEVER, by having a drive, that then means that nobody else is legally allowed to park in front of it. Therefore, the upshot is that a potential parking space on the public road effectively ends up being reserved exclusively for your household's sole use (apart from by moving traffic passing across it). Added to which, it's an unwritten rule (never challenged AFAIK) that, if there are no yellow lines or white H-marks there, YOU can park across it as you're only potentially blocking yourself/your own household in.

Ergo, you've bagged yourself the legal right to your own exclusively reserved parking space on the public road, just because of the layout of your property and the fact that the building itself is set back sufficiently from the road - whether you park in that space, use it for access or both; or indeed if you don't have a car or any driving visitors and so it remains permanently empty and reserved for your exclusive (non)-use. If you hadn't had a property sized and laid out in such a way to allow off-road parking (and possibly paid a one-off fee to the council to drop the kerb), there would have been another parking space (maybe two) on the road available for anybody and everybody to use - first come, first served.

Is this fair? Is it those of us with drives who are actually the biggest, most selfish CFs of all - all the while congratulating ourselves for being self-sufficient and considerate by not territorially taking up a space on the road like those without drives?!?!

We have a cul de sac few doors down everyone from there parks on our st builders van always parked outside our house so you were pulling out blind had a few near misses .
Had a word with him and he said tax and insured tough .We have double drive but only single dropped kerb had it extended fullwidth now only us can park there as not enough room to park outside our house unless you overhang our dropped kerb . Builder guy was fuming

I know of someone who was so sick and tired of a neighbour parking their car outside his house that he removed the wall and had it made into a huge driveway, therefore stopping the neighbour from parking there.

Surprised the council gave permission for that. Will have cost the homeowner a lot to have the full length of pavement turned into a dropped kerb.

This is an interesting view op.

I think when a house/estate is built with drives its ok but when a front garden is converted to a drive, especially if parking is difficult anyway then it is a bit cf.

My aunty lives on a cul de sac. Its not a wide road so people park either side leaving just enough room for one car at a time to drive up and down. At the top turning circle there used to to be room for 5 cars (cars would park so that front or back of car was at the curb rather than side). Then one of the neighbours made their front into a drive so now only 3 cars can park there.

I can fit at least 2 cars on your drive so (If my DSs ever bother learning to drive) I will be leaving an extra space on the road. However, all the houses here have drives so it is mostly irrelevant.

I get where you are coming from as you're right - effectively you have removed one on-road parking spot so that you have your own parking spot outside your house. This does actually make it tricky in roads where there are many converted front gardens as there can end up being nowhere for visitors or people without a drive to park.

Good grief, its before 8 on a Sunday morning!

Is this what we are reduced to expending our mental energy on?

@BillywilliamV

Good grief, its before 8 on a Sunday morning! Is this what we are reduced to expending our mental energy on?

Only if you want to.

@GinDaddyRedux @RincewindsHat or maybe it's because houses are ridiculously expensive so we buy what we can afford?

Me and DH bought our terraced house with one parking space knowing we'd have to park one car on the road wherever we could. Houses with ample parking were beyond our budget. As it stands we've now got rid of one car as our work circumstances changed and we could share. But not everyone can afford a big detached house with a driveway.

We have a drive and a garage we park in, does that make us extra cheeky? We only have one car, so our drive and dropped kerb are empty except when DH drives across them once a week to get the shopping.
Meanwhile our neighbours have two gravelled parking spaces out front (as per local planning regs) and always park one of their cars on the road.
Across the way they have a garage too small for their cars, their drive is full of a caravan, and their other 3 cars park on the road.
Their frequently visiting family park outside our house, on the bit that's not dropped kerb.
The previous owner of our house had no car, so a neighbour across the road used to park on the driveway to keep the street clearer and make the house look more occupied.

There are lots of ways to manage parking, households have different parking needs, and it's best if we all just work it out together and communicate (as we do on my street, all the parking examples I mentioned are harmonious and everyone gets along).

I hate it when people with drives park on the road using up one of the general spaces. A road near us campaigned for parking restrictions even though every single house had its own very large drive.

I agree that this is sometimes the case. Where I grew up most of the road had driveways, fine, they could afford to buy a house and we were in a council house so funny enough you don't usually get much choice in the additional amenities other than roof over head and probably enough bedrooms. My parents couldn't afford a car anyway, but I worked and saved for one to help make their life easier when I left sixth form- public transport is rubbish here so it meant I could take them to a cheaper supermarket etc. Nowhere to park the thing though, the adjoining streets were too narrow as well so it was annoying. If people all used their drives fair enough, but one neighbour couldn't be arsed to park in theirs so took essentially 3 spaces on the road, one for their car and 2 for their huge work vehicle. My neighbour had a double drive, so 2 car spaces taken away from the road, she didn't have a car and seldom had visitors, fine though, it's her drive, but if you parked a cm over the drop kerb (leaving still room for 2 cars to comfortably get in), best believe she would be out moaning. What odds was it to her though, really? She used to say buy somewhere else if you want a drive, because obviously that's a possibility to wveryone. We have a drive now in our house, it's nice to have, I'm not overly precious about it and often the neighbours ask to use it for visitors, and that's fine.

Yabu, we have 4 cars and are the only house on the street with a functional driveway - if we didn't have a drive there would, potentially, be less on street parking for everyone else..

The entrance to our driveway is shared with our neighbours with our own parking spaces behind our gardens. That's 4 cars off the road with 1 driveway.

Well I must be the complete opposite to a CF.

We live at the end of the street with 5 houses, each house has a driveway for 2 cars. But we don't mind if our neighbour parks their 3rd car in front of our house as we can still use our drive and they are not parked on the already overcrowded road.

What annoys me is the people who turn family homes into HMO's. So you go from a family with 1 or 2 cars to god knows how many cars and no provision for the extra parking needed.

I don't know really based on your example.

I think the biggest CF are people like my parents neighbours. They have a driveway with three cars on it when only two people live in the house, and then park their fourth car outside their house (across the garden wall, not across the driveway). They then complain about me parking outside their house, in 'their' spot when I visit and because I refused to move my car, they now make a point of attempting to block me in. What they don't know is that I have lived in a terraced street and am accustomed to get my car in and out of tighter spots. They are CF.

People are so addicted to car travel that they would stamp and shout if the council or government restricted people to one car per household. 1). Unless you live in a city centre, a car for each working member of the family may well be a necessity, public transport being what it is. 2) As a result of Covid we are being actively encourage to use cars rather than public transport.

So I wound't say people are addicted to car travel, it' more that the way we have set up our society makes car travel almost unavoidable.

In our old house we had next door neighbours who parked in front of our house all the time which meant that dh or i had to park up the road in front of someone elses house

We made the garden into a drive and got the kerb dropped, we wouldn’t have done this if we could have parked in front of the house

In our current house the drive (that again used to be a garden) will hold 3 cars easily...4 if they are small and you are good at tetris, we’ve never applied to get the kerb dropped.

Maybe all new houses that are built should be built with drives and parking for at least 2 cars on them. Instead of trying to ram as many houses into as small a space as possible

Well I can no longer walk to work thanks to covid. I now have to work from an office further away. I don't live near a train station. The bus stop is a good 20 minute walk away and I can't possibly rely on getting a seat on the bus so I have to have a car to get to work. We don't all live in a world where public transport is abundant.

Off on a slight tangent, to address the point that it’s illegal to park over the dropped kerb, our council lets you register your number plate so you can do exactly that (at home) which is quite clever I think.

Our council ensured that they got the income from lots of houses having to have the kerb dropped by putting double yellow lines in front of lots of houses (Including mine) and then making large swathes of the rest of the road “permit parking” and sold more permits than there are spaces..... if I hadn’t got my kerb dropped and garden converted then really would put have had anywhere to park.... the CFs in this case were the council.

HOWEVER, by having a drive, that then means that nobody else is legally allowed to park in front of it.

Can someone tell that to the CFs who regularly park over my drive blocking me in?! We try and do the right thing by keeping at least one car on the drive/in the garage but when some inconsiderate twat thinks that’s an ok thing to do, it gives me the ducking rage!

hedgehogger new builds are designed by a computer to fit the maximum number of houses in a development and hence maximum profit.

The obvious answer for new builds is to make streets one-way, wide enough for an emergency vehicle and provide each property with one parking space. Then build a small multi-storey car park nearby. That way people who need a car for mobility reasons are catered for, whilst those who have more than 1 vehicle have a short walk to get to it. An annual rental would cover maintenance and security costs.

addicted to car travel?

news for you London types; not everywhere has your frequent, reliable, 24/7, subsidised public transport. One bus an hour here, stops at 7pm, no service Sundays, very limited destinations; to get to a railway station it is 3 buses A DAY.

if I still worked outside the home we would be a 2 car household.

Thanks, folks - some very interesting observations. I hope it was clear that this was intended as lighthearted, but it seemed to me a mildly interesting point for discussion.

I hadn't factored in that drives will often accommodate more than one car, and that the necessary width to access a drive by driving/reversing in is probably a quarter to a third of the space needed for a car to be parked on the road, allowing for manoeuvring room.

Having said that, there are a great many people with drives who firmly believe (and it seems to be universally accepted as 'only fair') that they should be entitled to a wide empty space either side of their drive entrance and often nobody to park opposite their drive (assuming no yellow lines or other house's drive). You frequently hear "If somebody parks there, I can't get on my drive if I'm coming from this direction". Surely the idea is that you have sufficient space to access your drive and not that you have the legal right to swoop in widely from any direction you prefer with no manoeuvring ever required at all? It isn't helped that so many people drive in to their drive instead of reversing on (technically against the law, I believe) and then never seem to realise that visibility will be more of a problem when joining a busy road backwards.

I had a friend at university who had a designated parking space behind the flat where she lived (at the end - underneath was a shop where the assistants all walked in from their very nearby homes). She'd been the first student living there for some time to have a battered old car, so the man with a garage behind the next property had got used to using the space for manoeuvring in and out of his garage. When she started using her rightful space, he angrily told her that she mustn't do so, because he 'needed' it to get in and out of his garage! I was there with her when she first encountered him. It was the easiest way for him, but there was plenty of room for him to access his garage using only the common access road area, albeit requiring a tiny bit more manoeuvring. I got the impression from how he spoke that he wasn't a particularly good or patient driver, but that's hardly an excuse for annexing somebody else's parking space! He even tried to play the 'my car is much newer and more valuable than yours' card!

True as well that it keeps stationary cars off the streets and thus eases the flow of traffic.

I'm not convinced by the suggestions that it's entitled or a liberty to expect to be able to park on the road. We pay road tax to put our car on the public roads, so each car takes up the same car's worth of space on the public road whether it's moving or parked - does that make such a difference?

As for storing broken old fridges on the road, the roads aren't designed for them and thus a fridge is not legally required to pay road tax, have insurance or undergo a regular MoT - I'd love to see your collection of them, though, Ifailed