ugly parking causing frustration

[RoxyMoosic]

Live on a street of semi detached houses. It’s a ‘nice’ area. Most houses have room for 2 cars. Depending on configuration could fit 3, or just 1 if a larger area of garden instead of driveway.

the crux of the matter is that residents are parking on the street. E.g house over the road has room for 1 car on the driveway. They moved in a few years ago and bought the house knowing this. Yet have 2 cars and permanently park 1 on the street outside their house. All in a quite considerate manner btw. But I just think is stupid and inconvenient on their part anyway.

other residents park on the street despite having room on the driveway, presumably because they can’t be bothered reversing in/out every time they want to leave.

house a few doors up inexplicably owns 4(!) cars, with room for only 2 on the drive, with regular visitors too parking all over the place.

when the street is chocked up with cars I just find it so unbecoming and quite frankly ugly . It didn’t used to be like this even 10/15 years ago, when people had only enough cars that they could fit on their driveway…. I feel this was helped by the fact that they were often older couples who only had one car…. and those who invariably buy the house are families and have more cars than they can fit on their property.

so… AIBU to think on-street parking is ugly and ruins the look of the street…?

Even with 4 adults who work or study miles away and not on public transport routes?! Where I live there's one bus every half hour that goes to closest city. For me to get to work it would take about 3 hours and a combination of 2 buses and some walking. It's 30 minutes in car. Same for DH but he works in completely opposite direction. Most of the country live in areas with poor public transport.

@MissMaple82
My parents have a car each and always did when we were growing up due to both working shifts. Then at one point me and my sister both still lived at home and both had a car, which we also needed.

We bought our house 18 years ago when our children were 5 and 1.
fast forward to a year ago, me and DH both have cars. DS (24) has a car and a work van. DS’s Gf has a car and DD (18) has a car, so 6 vehicles altogether. Everyone works and has to have a car, public transport is awful so no option.
DS and GF have now moved out so down to 3 cars, 2 on drive and one on road which is normal here!

sometimes there is no option!!

some cities around the world are removing cars from the street for other reasons, I do think it’s a nicer

many older cars pre 1960 are attractive but what do people find attractive about cars on the street in lines?

I’m with you op,
it just looks so clutted,
so we bought a house with a road you can’t park on!

I wonder how I would've squeezed three child car seats in a 1980s car

why haven’t manufacturers adapted the product to fit the small car range?

what do you do if you drive a vw up?

I know I'm in the minority but I agree with you. We have the same down our road. Interestingly when cold/icy weather forecast the slalom of driving up the road is much easier as people park on their drives, presumably to avoid possible damage to their vehicle if a passing motorist loses control on the icy road.

Once lived on a road in London where there was no off street parking. Ok, managed to park my car outside most of the time, but there was one occasion where I had to park about six houses up.

Out comes the resident, an elderly old man, who told me I wasn't allowed to park in front of his house (it was a public road with no permit restrictions). A discussion ensued. He told me he wasn't a driver himself but he would talk to his wife about it. Poor fella, his wife had died years ago.
I was upset about this man, his confrontational attitude and his obvious delusions, so I decided that worrying about parking spaces, no matter what, is always a definite no.
Nowadays I live in a housing association house with one allocated parking place, one spare, some road parking. Whenever anyone new moves in I soon greet them and explain that parking is never an issue; we are a community and we share as long as no-one gets blocked in without arranging it.
I have to play 'car jenga' sometimes, but it's no hassle really.
Three cars / three drivers.

You’re being very unreasonable.

In the same way 1930s houses weren’t designed to accommodate fridge freezers, dishwashers, washers and tumble dryers, houses built from the 1920s to the 2000s weren’t built to accommodate multiple vehicles per house.

Society changed, needs changed. The housing market went insane.

So now it’s common for the adult children to have cars to get to work, be unable to afford a house, and there to be no space on the drive.

Wow, there’s a mental guy who lives near my DC’s school who gets irrationally angry with the parents who park on the public highway to pick up their children.
my advice to the pair of you is: if you don’t like people parking in close proximity to your house, then sell up, and buy a grand Manor House with a private drive!
until you do that, you just have to face the fact that your house is on a public highway, and any Tom, Dick or Harry can and will park in front of your house!

I just don't understand why they keep designing houses with garages
All the townhouses on my street have them, nobody actually uses them. They all park on the drive. One has converted it into another bedroom

My childhood home was one of those typical 3 bed 30s semi detached with bay windows, an arched porch and a garage and a short drive.
My first car, a 1973 Ford Cortina, didn't fit in the garage nor on the drive. It's boot stuck out!

@bloodywhitecat in the 1980's you wouldn't have used child seats! Some of my fondest memories are of me and my cousins arguing over who would sit in the boot of my grandads Mazda estate! 4 kids on back seat and 2 sat in the boot! We all wanted to sit in the boot! 😆😆

@MissMaple82 wondering how you come to that conclusion? When I lived with my parents and me and my siblings started driving, we had 4 cars parked on the driveway.

We all worked in different area's, had different, start and finish times, so we were unable to help each other out. Buses were not an option either. We all needed our own mode of transport!

It was more a musing of which came first; huge car seats or bigger cars? As a 70s child regularly travelled with 7 (2 adults and 5 kids) of us squeezed into our next door neighbours VW Beetle or rode shotgun in the boot of a Humber estate, rear seatbelts were a thing of the future back then and car seats for kids were a twinkle in the eye of some distant inventor.

I find it extraordinary that anyone could have such a wholly unimaginative and insular world-view that they they would need to ask that.
The answer is that they don’t find cars on the street to be ‘unbecoming’. It simply doesn’t bother them because they hold different opinions to you. You may find life less bewildering if you bear in mind that this is something that people may do from time to time.

Perhaps people for whom car-free streets are a priority should only buy houses on streets with double-yellow lines? Or perhaps that’s equally ludicrous.

I agree with you op.
I live in a new development in a naive area.
The number of residents who fail to use their garage and drive is bizzare.
examples include:
Huge detached houses with a garage and drive for 3 cars, 2 if you are a poor driver or own a massive bus like car. Park one car on drive then park one car across the grass verge, which is paid for by all residents so not their private land, resulting in destroying the verge because it is wet, then all that remains is mud and tyre marks. Another huge detached where the man can't possibly have his large works vehicle on his own drive so uses one of the visitor parking spots across from his neighbours. Another household with 2 giant cars plus a trailor. Trailer on drive, 2 cars on road, visitors then parking anywhere they can dump their cars resulting in a huge row as another neighbour told them to stop blocking her drive.
Not to mention parking on the winding streets when it's icey and snowing resulting in making it unsafe for other road uses.
Sometimes I deliberately park on the street just to join in as I think I must be doing it wrong by actually parking on my drive.

This only annoys me when there are spaces on the drive. We can fit 3 cars on our drive, we have 2 so when people visit they can usually get on the drive unless they have a very large car. In those cases we put our small car on the road. Generally my neighbours can fit 2 cars on their drive so there aren’t too many cars on the road other than 3+ adult households or when there are a lot of visitors. I just dislike that my neighbour chooses to park their large car directly in front of my lounge window instead of theirs for some reason.

Friendship they do it because they are rude, entitled and don't give a damn about you. Probably the type of person to let their child scream through someone else's wedding. Those types.

Nothing you can do about it. They're doing nothing wrong. Maybe you should move.

Streets without cars are much nicer

How often do people really spend gazing lovingly out at their street? Maybe just get a grip and do something interesting. Read a book. Build a Lego set. Watch a good programme on telly. Buy some watercolours and paint idyllic streets of semi detached houses with one Ford Focus in each driveway. Get a life.

Well legally they can park 30 cars on the street but I agree that it is bad form to have 4 cars when you only have space for 2 cars. It ruins some streets and turns them into carparks. There is no need for any semi detached household to have 4 cars anyway. The likelihood is there is only one family living there and whether the children can drive or not 4 cars are not necessary and too much for the environment.

It is a bit gross how much public space is given over to storing private vehicles.

Totally the same here. Weekends, one side of the road is lined with parked cars and it's always a squeeze to get through and school hours (we have a local school on the corner of the estate) a nightmare. Mostly detached houses and we have widened out driveway to take our 2. It used to be quite sensible but so many more cars. I don't bother much though.