Bloody ridiculous! This is an example of cut your nose off to spite your face.
The dropped curb or vehicle crossover doesn’t give a reserved parking space, but it does give access to the property across the foot way. People who have this are able to access their property AND to park or allow their guests to work across it, as they can control the access to the their own property.
Is this unfair? Yes, in the sense that people who have bigger houses have an unfair advantage over those with smaller, those with more cars have something unfair. Life is just unfair. Some people have more than others. The very nature of having off-road parking requires access from the public highway to it, which removes public parking. BUT, the key point is that NO-ONE is entitled to park on the public highway as a matter of right….so the loss of a space to this isn’t actually a loss, but any which do exist need to be seen as a gain. The Police and Highways agencies COULD deny public parking on the road to all. They don’t because it would be so hard to enforce and most public parking doesn’t do any harm, but they could if they so chose. Therefore, those losing out to dropped kerbs, are not actually losing out officially, as the highway wasn’t actually there as a common resource for parking anyway. It is this idea that something available for all has been commandeered by one person into private property, which is wrong. The highway remains the property of the highways agency. The person whose property is accessed from it, simply has access across the highway, which clearly cannot be achieved if other people park across it. That’s why they shouldn’t. The owner or their guests can do so because it doesn’t restrict access as the owner can move the car blocking access.
People also get muddled with what the law says and what the police will do. The Highway Code says people shouldn’t park across dropped curbs but not that they must not. In some areas the Police will respond to a blocked curb reported by the property owner with a ticket. In a few areas they will tow. In many areas they refer to Highways and ask them to ticket. In some areas they are too stretched to do anything.
The vast majority if people understand you don’t park across a dropped curb and go off an.d leave your car there, meaning the owner cannot access their drive or worse, get off their drive. Only very odd people are insistent that they can and will do this because the Highway Code says should not, not must not, or because they think it’s unfair that the owner can do it and they cannot, so therefore have some kind of desire to make a point (although quite what they hope to achieve is unclear). Everyone else parks on their own drive, across their own drive or takes their chances on a first-come-first-served basis with the highway parking that the highways agencies and councils haven’t chosen to make permit only parking or face other restrictions. In some places, people can get lots of public road parking and in other areas none. It’s just life in terms of inequality and the highways agency doesn’t have a remit if trying to promote equality of access to parking.