To think that there are too many parked cars on the roads these days?

[JammyRedRooo]

Its absolutely ridiculous in my area. Whole swathes of road are basically one lane only due to the amount of parked cars. It makes visibility when driving really difficult.

Half of the houses have empty drives as well!

You can't turn into my cul de sac on the correct side of the road because of the row of parked cars all the way up to the junction, it's just so dangerous.

I know you pay a premium for a house with parking, or households often have more cars than spaces but I find it so infuriating and unsafe.

Anyone else?

YANBU.

But this is MN, where the view is “do not date a man who doesn’t drive” and “when you have children you NEED 2 massive SUVs per family”, and also “I worry about climate change but not enough to use public transport”, so don’t expect much.

@Onlyforcake

Pavement parkers.... I just scratch the sides of the car these days.

Don't do this, they might be twats but it might not be their car.

@DonutEvenAsk

I think the issue is that when lots of houses were built, there were no where near as many cars on the road. Nor was it considered.

But I agree.

It’s amazing how when you see old photos of streets how wide they looked, simply because there were hardly any cars.

We have two cars and a drive. Both cars could in theory go on the drive but as the house next door is extended over their driveway, our driveway is too narrow to comfortably get out of the car without scraping the door on the wall. I suppose we could get rid of the front garden, pave it over for hard standing…….

Where I live, it’s not just that no one has a drive, it’s also that with some proprieties you are not allowed to buy a residents’ permit to park in the street. Normally you have to buy a pricey residents’ permit to be allowed to park at all. Some properties are never granted that permission to buy. A while ago, the council even offered financial incentives for residents to give up their residents’ parking permit for, I think, five years.

@Onlyforcake

Pavement parkers.... I just scratch the sides of the car these days.

That isn’t something I’d boast about if I were you.

@DoNotTouchTheWater

Still no one seems to have worked out that fewer parking spaces is not the same thing as fewer cars.

It’s classic policy making based on totally inaccurate assumptions about human behaviour.

Making parking hard without considering why so many people need to drive and addressing the barriers to them doing anything else just makes people angry and resentful.

It actually undermines environmental policy in its entirety.

Yes this, absolutely.

@Iamthewombat

If there had been a bus that picked me up from my house and dropped me off outside my work, I'd have got rid of the car without a doubt.

When I hear people saying that they HAVE to park their car on the pavement, or blocking a junction, because they HAVE to travel in a car that they can’t park safely or considerately because public transport is, according to them, so terrible, I think this is what they mean. Why can’t a bus be constantly waiting on standby to pick them up from home and take them to the door of their destination? It’s simply not fair.

But public transport IS terrible and unusable for many. Doesn’t excuse bad parking but it does explain why so many genuinely need a car.

I said that people use bad public transport as an excuse for blocking junctions and parking on pavements. I get why people would use it as justification for having a car, but not to justify selfish and dangerous parking.

@Iamthewombat

I said that people use bad public transport as an excuse for blocking junctions and parking on pavements. I get why people would use it as justification for having a car, but not to justify selfish and dangerous parking.

Good policy making should anticipate and mitigate against undesirable behaviour like this. The best way to do that is to understand what’s actually going on and create the conditions in which people won’t block junctions etc.

I agree, OP but I don't particularly sympathise from the perspective of other drivers but OBO pedestrians I think we need to seriously rethink the amount of our public space dedicated to storing and running cars. I still think it's batshit that we're happy for so much of our space to be devoted to storing people private possessions (cars). I say this as a driver who's previously got rid of a car but found it more and more difficult to get around with increasingly unreliable and underfunded public transport.

@daisypond

Where I live, it’s not just that no one has a drive, it’s also that with some proprieties you are not allowed to buy a residents’ permit to park in the street. Normally you have to buy a pricey residents’ permit to be allowed to park at all. Some properties are never granted that permission to buy. A while ago, the council even offered financial incentives for residents to give up their residents’ parking permit for, I think, five years.

I don’t even have a car and in that situation I’d never give up a parking permit that would be a significant factor in my house price if I ever wanted to move.

I have a huge problem with behaviour change ideas that are basically fiddling while Rome burns. Design policy and infrastructure properly so that it meets people’s needs such that they will choose to do the kinds of things that are desirable instead. That’s not preventing people from doing things or manipulating them (both poor ways to achieve outcomes); it’s creating the circumstances that serve people’s aims and make their lives better.

Still no one seems to have worked out that fewer parking spaces is not the same thing as fewer cars.

My local council has that problem. Two new fIve bedroom houses built near me. Local planning policy required them to have one and a half parking spaces each.

The houses have changed hands since being built. To minimise on-street parking, one has managed to create three parking spaces and both actually use their garages for housing a car.

@FloodTheBathroom

It's the multiple cars per household that gets me, and the looking after cars for friends. Why oh why are there 3 cars parked outside my house that haven't moved for weeks?! Who do they belong to? It's a mystery. Makes it hard to get off my drive. The there's the people paying to tax and insure a huge van conversion that's parked on the road 50 weeks of the year apart from their annual two week tour of Cornwall. No visibility and takes up a space for visitors. Drives me mad.

My OH passive aggressively sticks "airport parking" signs up when our neighbours have invited friends to use visitor bays to store their cars then driven them to the airport for a 2 week holiday. All so they can keep an eye on their car and the friends can enjoy free parking

Same here, tenanted house with 3 adults and 3 cars. House has a garage and one space. They never use the garage but park across what is the turning circle for the development.

I've asked the council for help as the deeds of all of our houses include keeping the turning circle free,
Comes under 'planning enforcement - ( infringement) as the development would not have been agreed without the turning circle ( emergency vehicle access, access to other houses).
Can't imagine what would happen in a fire, landlord not interested.

This would be a really good idea IF there was a massive investment in public transport

Or car parks, as in Japan.

Good policy making should anticipate and mitigate against undesirable behaviour like this. The best way to do that is to understand what’s actually going on and create the conditions in which people won’t block junctions etc.

I get that in relation to new builds, although I still think that the onus is on the car owner to park it considerately. It’s a problem in older residential areas though. I have a friend who lives in a terrace on a narrow street, clearly not designed for cars. Her neighbours are all firmly of the opinion that they should be able to park anywhere, opposite a junction, on the pavement so that prams and wheelchairs have to move into the road, blocking bus stops etc. because it is the council’s job to create parking space for their cars, near their houses.

How? Via a compulsory purchase order of several Victorian streets to build a massive (and free, naturally) multi-storey car park? It”s insane.

@Iamthewombat

Good policy making should anticipate and mitigate against undesirable behaviour like this. The best way to do that is to understand what’s actually going on and create the conditions in which people won’t block junctions etc.

I get that in relation to new builds, although I still think that the onus is on the car owner to park it considerately. It’s a problem in older residential areas though. I have a friend who lives in a terrace on a narrow street, clearly not designed for cars. Her neighbours are all firmly of the opinion that they should be able to park anywhere, opposite a junction, on the pavement so that prams and wheelchairs have to move into the road, blocking bus stops etc. because it is the council’s job to create parking space for their cars, near their houses.

How? Via a compulsory purchase order of several Victorian streets to build a massive (and free, naturally) multi-storey car park? It”s insane.

They need to consider various options. That’s the thing - it needs to be properly thought through.

The immediate problem of shit parking is not necessarily the thing you need to solve. You can do all sorts of things that change transform infrastructure, employment patterns, leisure opportunities that mean people don’t own so many cars and the problem of parking them goes away.

It needs to be a long term, whole systems thinking approach. Sadly, nothing about the structure of governance in this country enables that.

Instead we just get angry at each other.

I know, fleets of ‘Star pods’ (anyone who watched The Apprentice last night will know what I mean. Pink seats and karaoke machines for all!)

Let's see.

Round here parking on some pavements is council mandated - they even paint the white lines over the pavement so you can see where to park. Why? Because it isn't a modern city, it doesn't have wide roads, is crammed full of reasonable sized family houses and everyone needs to park somewhere.

Or, where I live, it's a medieval town. Nobody has a drive, or space to make one.

And no, we can't use public transport, they have just cancelled it. No, we can't shop locally, most 'local' is 7 miles away. No we can't walk to work, leisure centre, shops etc etc.

And we are being surrounded by any number of those teeny tiny developments of fuck offly large houses with little parking that no local can afford. So it's only going to get worse - especially when some of them work out why there have never been any houses built there...

It's frustrating when houses have more vehicles than adults to drive them. We have visitor parking bays in our street, which permanently park cars that residents don't have drive way space for - meaning when people have visitors, the cars are left abandoned on the road.

One house has an extra vehicle - a work van - which I can understand, but their neighbour has 3 cars between 2 adults (two children no where near driving age). No idea why they need so many cars?!

Where I live the roads were wide enough for two lanes of parking and two driving, just 3-5 years ago.

Now there are so many enormous cars that there will be some parked and some trying to drive that take up more than that 1/4 width space. Loads of roads are now a dangerous single road for both directions and lots of juggling in and out.

I don't think the council should award parking permits to cars over a certain size. Have different places that extra large cars can park, plan for it, but don't act like all cars are the same size.

No idea why they need so many?!

It’s only a problem if they have nowhere to keep them off the street. We have several vehicles shared between two adults. However, none are parked on the road.

agree. whenever you see old photos the streets look so much better without the cars parked everywhere, the verges damaged, the gardens paved over for parking etc

Reminds me of that news clip during summer 2020 where the woman on the busy beach who'd travelled for a couple hours to get there was complaining that too many people were coming to the beach now restrictions were lifted a bit... err hypocrite?