Just moved to an area in Essex where the busy high street has free on-street parking....actually outside the shops! Rare as hens teeth.
When I say busy, I mean it has bars, coffee bars, butchers, grocers, fish mongers, hairdressers and posh frock shops.
Funny thing is, it works, despite the presence of a very busy main line rail station There is a max 2hr limit with no return within 1 hour. You can ALWAYS find a space within 30 or 40 yards of where you need to be.
No one seems to take the Michael, no one double parks, it is all very civilised, and I have only seen one warden in the area in a month.
There seems to be an unwritten contract between local residents and the council. We won't extract the Mike, they wont introduce charges.
Have I died and gone to heaven? Is the local council eventually going to rain on my parade?
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We live in an "olde worlde" market town whose original planners had nothing more than an odd horse and cart to allow for. The streets are narrow and in many cases pedestrianised. There are good car parks all around the edge of the town centre and they are not outrageously expensive. The sort of irritating thing is though that although the car parks are closely monitored by attendants (and woe betide anyone who goes over their time as they will be ticketed) the streets do not seem to be monitored or patrolled at all. This despite, liberal applications of yellow paint and other modern street "enhancing" signage. The result is that rather than spend 50p on an often adjacent car park people just park on the yellow lines and gum up the town. The common sense gene does sometimes appear to being gradually diluted. Or am I just turning into another V. Meldrew clone ?
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Here in Sunderland there's no free parking within the city, in fact accessing the central area in a car is very difficult. Parking is expensive and the multi-storey car parks are a pain to get into and out of. The local authority continually find new ways of making driving more difficult through the centre.
As a result, I personally avoid shopping in the city centre and visit places with free parking. I'm sure many people with cars, who are usually the ones with money to spend, think this way. As the type of city centre shopper becomes much less diverse, the choice of shops ends up being of no appeal to me, clothes shops, mobile phone shops etc. Shop rentals and business tax rise above inflation rates and the diversity of shops declines even more.
Eventually the city centre will end up as a deserted space, tumble-weed blowing along the streets. The local authority will lose their parking and business rate income and will wonder where it all went wrong. Meanwhile, those with real cash to spend will be parking out of town. If the authorities try to charge for this we will give up visiting shops and just spend on the internet.
The end result, a local authority starved of income, many fewer jobs in retail, city centre that only has any life in it once the pubs and clubs open, and I wouldn't call the type of life around at that time civilised.
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On Boxing Day 1981 my car was parked by the side of the road when it was hit by a passing car. The cost of repairs was half the value of the car (18 month-old Escort) and it took 11 weeks. You won't catch me parking on the road again. No way Pedro!
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L\'escargot.
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L'escargot
One night back in 1986 I lost my virginity to a girl I met in a roller-skating rink in Ashton. It was sordid, depressing, under-rated, my mother caught us and she got pregnant - all while I was taking my O levels. Had I followed your philosophy and "never parked my car on the high street" again, I would have missed out on some of the best experiences of my life.
Go out today and park on that high street. Get back on the horse Pedro!
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......... my mother caught us and she got pregnant ........
Your mother got pregnant? That's some wide-roaming tadpoles you've got there, Big Bad Dave!
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L\'escargot.
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"many fewer jobs in retail"
Many fewer. I like it. That's going in my book.
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Totally agree, doctorchris.
Where I live not only have the two car parks I parked in for town shopping been sold off for re-development, but the public transport prices have increased so much that it's over a tenner to take my family into town.
So now I do most of my shopping on the internet or in the out-of-town shopping centre and retail park which has free parking.
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Here in Sunderland there's no free parking within the city in fact accessing the central area in a car is very difficult.
Totally agreed, even the Limelight quarter which offers free parking has a catch; I stuggle to get the Mondeo in and out of the multi-storey, I have never encountered such tight spaces and access points in any other car park!
As for the City Centre, I'm still a student, so can park all day for £1 at the central campus, but actually finding a space is another matter, then I have to walk through people that, ultimately, I would rather pretend didn't exist.
Far easier for me is to go to the Metro Centre, free parking, and far less of the untouchables. I also agree that the shops seem better there too, all of the ones that I normally visit are bigger there and have a broader range than they do in Sunderland. My dad is currently looking for a nice piece of jewellery for my mam's 50th, he rang one of the major high street places and was told that if he wanted something really nice he would need to go to Newcastle or the Metro Centre as they don't bother selling the really good stuff in Sunderland. :-( We'd rather spend our money locally but there just doesn't seem to be any encouragement.
But hey, this is a council that had so little vision for the city that they didn't bother buying Vaux, the biggest development opportunity to hit the city in 100 years and they let Tescos get their hands on it. At least the leader got sacked for it, but talk about shutting the stable door... Now, years later, the land lies fallow right in the middle of the city centre whilst they waste taxpayers money trying to purchase it back from Tescos. They also make it very difficult to build what I would class as real executive housing as they say that the City doesn't need it, erm, isn't it their job to make sure that it is needed? I'm thinking something like Wynyard Park where most of my former neighbours now live, leaving empty houses in Sunderland in their wake. Anyone visiting the North East would be encouraged to visit Newcastle Quayside at night, that's what vision gets you.
The only time that I will say Sunderland is easy to get into is after 10pm weeknights (except Fri), I can literally drive right into the heart of the city and park on the street outside of my chosen bar, it contravenes the no access signs (which don't expire until midnight) but the Police take no interest in something so minor and seem happy to let people off with it. :-)
However, whilst I might have bile for the abiility of our council's city centre management policies, at least the rest of the city is easy to drive around, Newcastle is so anti car that I'm surprised that they don't position sentrys on the Tyne Bridge to shoot out your tyres as you enter, that's why Newcastle doesn't get my shopping money either, the only easy way to get there is by Metro, but that means that I would have used public transport.
Blue
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Hi Blue, weird things about to happen at the end of Chester Rd, just by the mosque. It appears to me that this will become bus only and the Chester Rd traffic will be diverted onto Durham Rd. Thus, the traffic on Durham Rd will be doubled and accessing the city centre even more awkward.
Newcastle, well, they are so anti-car. Their attempts to impose "no car lanes" are so amateurish and pathetic that they are universally ignored.
All boils down to a bunch of failed and tired socialists in the North-East trying to revive the region as it was in the years and books of Catherine Cookson.
You sound as though your ideas match mine, we could meet up for a mutual whinge. Look out for me in the city with the Turquoise Panda 4x4, just hope I've not cut you up, probably not as I reserve my bile for Station Taxis and pensioners.
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>>No one seems to take the Michael, no one double parks, it is all very civilised, and I have only seen one warden in the area in a month.
There seems to be an unwritten contract between local residents and the council. We won't extract the Mike, they wont introduce charges. <<
See what happens when you leave Joe Public to manage their lives themselves - we can be grown up and 99% actually drive safely and within reasonable speed limits.
It's just this government for the last 10 years has treated us all like naughty school kids with CCTV and speed cameras on every corner plus tried to get us out of our cars with huge increases in fuel and road duty and now road pricing.
This is all being done whilst introducing a traget culture that stops our police forces doing their job and being out there to police our streets properly.
There will always be some people - infact there were 2 BMW's !! parked on double yellow lines in our town today with hazards on waiting and causing a hazard while their other halfs nipped to the cash machine - but generally most people do not abuse the system.
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From what I've seen, when you leave Joe Public to manage themselves, they can't.
In Eastbourne, we've had an attempt by Eastbourne County Council to introuduce a town wide pay and display parking scheme that was thwarted at the last minute by the Borough Council.
Now there are no parking controls.
Demonstrating that people can't manage themselves and generally haven't got a clue, people park on double yellow lines, disabled bays, loading bays, wherever, without fear of getting a ticket.
And it's not stopping for short periods of time to pop into the newsagents or bakers, it's hours at a time while they go shopping or go to work.
It's sad but most people need some form of hand holding in life to get through it.
Chris
Edited by Chris White on 01/12/2007 at 16:36
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£27,000was £28,000Details
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