POSING THE QUESTIONS ON PARKING

At Monday’s meeting of the New Town & Broughton Community Council, councillors and members of the public discussed parking, writes Caroline Roussot. City of Edinburgh Council (CEC) has launched several draft proposals and a consultation (see Issue 245), for which the deadline is the end of this month. 

If you've completed the online questionnaire, as opposed to sending free-form comments to a ward councillor or whatever, you'll see that you have to go through pages and pages of questions about just how outraged you feel about pavement parking, about parking over junctions, about danger to cyclists from badly parked cars and other issues like that.

All of which has precious little to do with the measures proposing to increase charging hours. CEC is – somewhat disingenuously in my opinion – trying to whip up support for what they want to do by suggesting that it will sort out issues such as those above, when actually they already have the powers to punish pavement parkers etc. It's just that it doesn't suit the Council to enforce these rules.

Also disingenuous is the appeal to householders: vote for this and we'll protect your right to park in front of your property. In fact, CEC is committed to exactly the opposite.

Now, if the Council genuinely wants to make householders' lives easier, all it needs to do is tot up the number of permits per street and ensure that there are roughly the right number of permit spaces allocated to it. On my street, we're in the happy position of having lots of people without a car, so pressure on spaces is not acute. But places like Hart Street (also Zone 6) are simply ridiculous – there must be at least 20 per cent more cars than spaces. CEC has changed the parking layout there to increase the number of spaces, but a big portion of the street, in the middle and on the left as you descend, remains with a yellow line. No wonder the locals are infuriated.

If CEC is serious about reducing the number of people who have a car, it will have to think about how to encourage this. The stupid City Car Club is rubbish: it’s absolutely crazily expensive and unsuitable for anyone going away for a weekend. It’s only right for trips that take a couple of hours – like a trip to IKEA – and you'd actually be cheaper getting a taxi both ways as you pay by the mile as well as by the minute. It's OK for those with a fixed car-as-essential mindset, and might encourage such people to get rid of their third car, but it certainly won't prompt them to reduce from one to none.

Why is CEC not exploring genuine alternatives to car ownership, such as the Easycar Club, where owners offer out their vehicles, when not in use, to people who live nearby. If you had, say, ten people in your zone who shared their car like that, you could easily get rid of your own.

I'm against the extension of paying hours because there isn’t a problem round me, and because when we have visitors or hire a car for the weekend I prefer to do without the hassle. But also, I suspect that the measures proposed won’t really help where problems genuinely exist.

On Monday, NTBCC resolved to recommend a piecemeal rather than an overarching strategy on parking issues. It wants to judge each street according to its needs and limitations, tapping the expertise of those who live there in much the same way as waste collection has been approached in recent years across the New Town. Whether that will elicit confidence or despair remains a moot point.

To have your say, visit the Council website here.

Got a view? Tell us at spurtle@hotmail.co.uk and @theSpurtle and Facebook

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@theSpurtle Filled in the questionnaire yesterday. You're right. It's prejudicial to the point of "when did you stop beating your wife?".