Latest Moan From You and Me 2024

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Separate Moan Thread About The Election

@DiggersJo - never too late

 

Back to normal moans

Villages and properties around here are getting a lot of trouble with illegal parking. There is an airport about a 15-20 minute drive away from us, with quite a few villages closer, and some 'off-airport parking' companies don't just use their own site but take the cars and leave them in streets and even village car parks for a week or two until the owners are returning.

We're beginning to get organised and 'clamping' down on it.

Please check if you are using an off-airport parking company as some of them use this practice and I know that some residents have been letting down the tyres or even damaging cars that have been left in their roads.

The village halls in the area are now starting to get parking systems where hirers have to register their cars on a pad in the main hall otherwise they get clamped.

 

With the University of Surrey on our doorstep we get a lot of students parking, their cars don't move for weeks sometimes. Unfortunately that means double yellows are creeping along all the nearby roads with residents parking bays. Not quite in our road yet but we get a few commuters parking in our road and walking to the train station, it's a mile uphill but it saves £8/day at the car park.

 

Double-yellows are creeping in anyway, along with having to pay for on street parking in some places, mostly because councils are torn between absolutely hating motorists yet needing them as a cash-cow.

 

In the village down the road, near the local station, they have a single yellow line with no parking between 10-11 a.m. They haven't, yet, brought in a permit for residents as they have driveways.

 

There has been something of an explosion of vans, but then many businesses are now reliant on having smaller premises, without staff parking and contracted-out maintenance.

Even at my work, where parking was always limited during the day (and non-existent at night) there has been a dramatic reduction in available parking due to the installation of vehicle charging infrastructure and the fact that we are charging vehicles during the day as well as at night. Somewhat brightly, the local council have introduced further permit parking only, with a charge for each permit, in the surrounding streets - so that has had the effect of making life harder for residents (especially those with more than one vehicle in the household) but also has made it nigh on impossible for our staff to park anywhere near work.

"Use public transport" is the cry... only, it is a bit difficult to do that when it is not running at the time a lot of the staff are arriving, because THEY are the one about to go and drive the public transport to take other folks to work.

 

The net result of policies like this, of course, is that more and more folks have turned their front gardens into concrete yards where they have plenty of parking. It is happening as I type at the house directly across the road from us.

Then we wonder when we've got less land to absorb rainfall, let alone less plants, trees and colour.