Our car storage strategy in the UK is a joke. AIBU?

[JacquesHarlow]

Note: I'll put the disclaimers at the end of the thread to try and mitigate against the usual "never seen this before OP, you sound overly invested" gaslighters.

AIBU to think that for a small island with a rapidly growing population, our approach to car storage and parking is ... well, a joke?

And that we need to start restricting street parking somehow to stop the households who have three or four cars on the street, making life a misery for others and for visitors?

Hear me out please for a minute.

I admit I have mainly lived in suburbs or zone of major cities. And today, I have a driveway that can park 5 or 6 cars.

However in the nine places I've lived, and the many places I've visited, you see the same things:

• It doesn't matter if it's a street of semi-detached 4 beds, or a row of Victorian terraces, or a new build estate: you find houses not using driveways, parking cars nose to nose, often on kerbs.

• Even if a house has a driveway, the British driver's strange attitude to owning the street in front of their house, means they'd rather park on the road instead of the driveway. Meaning more congestion on the kerbside, fewer places for visitors etc.

• And let's face it, many can't even reverse onto the driveway or pilot their car with enough skill to use it

• Away from driveways, I have visited streets with HMOs where friends are tearing their hair out, people with 7 cars to one house. Imagine what happens to street parking then..

• Or it doesn't even need to be an HMO. Billy big balls can buy vintage pick up trucks and line them up on the street nose to nose and take all available parking. As long as you're within the permit structure, or if no CPZ, then all the cars are taxed and MOT'd? Then you're fine to have as many cars as you want on the street

• Finally, people who have three or four cars, tend to have the "advantage" in situations like this. They usually have one or two cars "in place", so if parking is tight, they can (and do) "shuffle things" around to ensure they keep their road positions.

So, AIBU to suggest another way? Can we limit the number of cars owned to two a household on a street, and with a designated storage place needing to be named for anything over 2 cars? Should all suburban streets have some form of visitor permits so that people aren't parking three streets away because big Billy has to be able to see his pickups from his window at all times? Can we have proper enforcement from councils to ensure wheelchair users, buggies, young people can actually traverse our streets without having to brush past metal which has taken up part of the kerb?

We're a small island with a lot of history. We weren't designed to have two rows of cars parked down either side of suburban and urban roads, with delivery drivers racing towards nervous nellies who then refuse to reverse.

We are however horribly in denial about parking. Councils are addicted to the revenue, or ignore the problems if they do exist, knowing that there's little or no alternative.

All I see on threads like these in the past are people saying

• "My eldest daughter uses her car for work, I use mine, so does my DH, and we have something fun for the weekends. I have every right to my four cars on the street. YABU"

• "You're advocating for 15 minute cities, you will own nothing and be happy, you're a communist, YABU"

Why are we so addicted to car use to the point where anything now goes?

AIBU to ask for a more forward thinking solution to car ownership, where people aren't owning five cars on one small suburban street, without a driveway? Surely car ownership is far too cheap if that's an option for any regular Joe.

What do you think...AIBU?

Again supermarket costs vary why should I pay close to ten pounds for a chicken when I can buy one in a shop for a fiver the mark up in tescos sainsburys etc doesn't make it good value for money I shop in aldi its cheaper I have a route I go to one supermarket that has cheap vegetables swing to aldi for my main shop nip across to morrisons for meat because although its not cheaper than aldi the portion size is perfect so there is no food waste

Could that be the same walthamstow aka mini holland due to its extensive cycle network?

So you'd rather sit in a traffic jam for half an hour.

If cars are sitting in a jam, so r buses

No, generally buses whizz through most traffic jams because buses are in bus lanes.

Yanbu @JacquesHarlow. If I could turn back the clock to when cars were becoming more popular, and could be supreme ruler too, I would institute rules that limit parking on public land to being never for more than 6 hours and never overnight except with highly limited occasional permits (eg so that if you are having a party, with multiple house-guests, onstreet parking can be allowed as a one-off). It would be really difficult to institute such rules retrospectively because people have chosen combinations of homes, jobs, schools etc which are impossible to manage without this ridiculous notion of being able to clutter up public land with your private property.

No, they're not where I live, and in many other parts of the UK.

@JacquesHarlow we don’t have bus lanes where i live. The same as we don’t have cycle lanes. And thats the problem isn’t it, one part of the country has buses, tubes, trains, uber, car shares, cycle lanes and makes it extremely convenient to use public transport and not require a car or even just require one car per house hold.

Then other parts have one bus an hour (or every 1.5 hours where i live), little rolly eyes at the person complaining about having to wait 12 mins (that would be the dream) but just envious of you. No buses on sundays, no buses before 7:15 am, no buses after 6pm, no cycle lanes, no tube, no train service that doesn’t require driving to and until reading this thread i hadn’t even heard of a car share app/service. So to be able to get around reliably cars are required for multiple members of the same family.

I have 4 adult children, what am i supposed to do, tell them they can't have a car - we addressed the problem by updating our property. I am not the problem at all!

Imagine if I erected a bike storage shed on the street (not blocking through traffic). There would be one heck of a kick-off, and the council would probably remove it. Yet people get very entitled about their "right" to reserve the section of street immediately in front of their house for the exclusive use of storing their private property.

Certainly you can, get a longtail or a bakfiets. Your husband can ride a seperate bike, because he presumably goes places without you as well as with you. As they grow older, the kids will be independant enough to ride themselves.

It's good enough for royalty:

Bikes are considerably slower and lighter than cars, therefore they cause far less damage. A wide variety of adapted cycles are available which can provide welcome independence for many people who are unable to drive due to disability.

Until very recently, local councils have not been allowed to run bus routes. They were privatised under Thatcher, with the exception of London Transport, which had the power and size to resist (One reason why public transport in London is markedly better than the rest of the country!)

I understand that Labour has changed/ is in the process of changing this so that councils will be able to run their own bus networks again. I imagine the uptake will be a trickle rather than a flood though, at least at first.

He can’t drive due to bad eye sight. So even without needing a licence, he probably shouldn’t be on an electric bike, for his own safety and others’. Obviously it wouldn’t be as bad to be hit by a bike as a car (although worse to be hit by an electric bike than a pedal bike I assume), but still seems a bit reckless.

Anyway, I appreciate most people don’t have a medical disqualification from driving. I was just saying that a suggestion to buy an electric bike and hire a car for longer journeys isn’t the most practical for anyone who needs to drive multiple passengers around. Plenty of people drive elderly relatives to appointments, for example.

There was a good reason why buses were taken away from local councils. The service was utter crap in our town! Some routes had no buses at all in the evenings or Sundays. The buses were notoriously unreliable and barely ever ran to timetable - more like ran to when the drivers felt like it! But the worst was that they didn't run "Between" towns - the services in our town all stopped at the border where they terminated and turned around. So you had to get off, walk across the town border and wait for the bus of the next town at it's border terminus to get to the next town's town centre for shopping, cinema, etc. Yes, there were district buses which went town to town but they didn't stop anywhere en route, just one town centre bus station to the next, i.e. express buses, so you had to get a bus to your own town bus station then wait for the express bus, to get you to the next town bus station, and then get a local bus to wherever you wanted to go - often a lot quicker just to walk across the boundary. When deregulation happened, all that nonsense stopped and we finally got buses that freely and openly cross the boundary as the same bus company ran the buses in both towns - something that the town's separate councils couldn't/wouldn't do!

If we go back to nationalised buses, I hope that none of that nonsense is allowed to return. Those of us living near town/county boundaries already suffer enough with nonsensical "local" council rules, i.e. when it's icy, the gritter literally stops at the boundary and turns around, leaving the rest of the road ungritted - until the gritter lorry from the other comes to do the rest of it. Same with road repairs, resurfacing etc - a monumental waste of money as economies of scale goes out of the window! Even emergency services won't cross the border from one county to another unless it's a major incident, meaning that if, say, we had a house fire, the fire engine in the closest station across the county border wouldn't come, we'd have to wait for one from our own county which is much further away - at least 10 minutes more! Same with police etc.

Look at the railways. Here in the NW, now back under government control, i.e. Northern Rail and TPX - service is still crap, lots of Sunday cancellations, expensive, unreliable, etc. Nationalisation has made no difference at all.

I’m getting 1984 vibes!

limiting the number of cars that can be owned - errr no.

encouraging people to be neighbourly and not take up others space- definite yes!

i think you need to either move to the countryside or get a bigger driveway yourself and stop getting worked up about other peoples car parking behaviours.

The bus lanes reference was for the poster who lives in london complaining about its extensive public transport network

Maybe where you r, but no not everywhere

Houses should have designated parking spaces. One for a house with 1-2 bedrooms. Two for a house with 3 or more bedrooms. Spaces on driveways in addition to that. You shouldn't be able to buy and register a car if you don't have a space to park it.

Could you speak to the council about a permit scheme? You'll need to get enough neighbours onboard.

Hi thank you, myself and immediate neighbours are looking into this. As im typing, this particular bloke has 4 large work vehicles ( 3 with trailers) a jeep and 2 cars parked down the length of the entrance road. No one else who lives nearby can park now. He lives a few streets away and he's been overheard saying that he doesn't want to clutter up his own area with his vehicles which is why he dumps them near us, causing people here loads of stress. As stated previously though, he doesn't give a shit. He's a breed of bloke who is massively pumped up with muscles, blasts the worst, chavvy dance music when he parks up near us and shouts down his phone at the top of his voice at all hours when he's driving off or parking up, pretty intimidating really. . With his parking and noise, he's making life pretty miserable for quite a few people here.

The carbon emissions of an electrically assisted pedal cycle are naff all - even after accounting for raw materials and electricity generation.

In fact they're so efficient that they generate half the emissions of walking.

It would be absolutely dreadful if something were to happen to his cars, parked so far from any CCTV system he may have...

My view is that if you have a vehicle over a certain size - van/motorhome/large SUV etc then you should be required to either park it off road overnight or have a parking permit for it.

Yes, of course you tell them that, or more precisely the council should tell them, if it gets it’s act together. Only 2/3 cars per household should be a national rule, and compulsory residents permits with a limit per household. I have two adult children living with DH and me, and none of us have a car.