Friday 13 February 2009

It's for their own, good, you know

This the flight of steps between Oxford Street and High Kingsdown, within the proposed RPZ, on a weekday.

Car W424XUR is parked so close the steps that it is impossible for pedestrians to use. The mother and daughter are having to delicately traverse the lower step, then squeeze through the gap between it and the car in front in order to get to the kids playground and pedestrian-friendly housing estate of High Kingsdown

Similarly, this well wrapped up woman with a walking-stick had to fight her way past this car.

Some people, would probably denounce this as a classic example of selfish car parking by car drivers who only care for finding somewhere to leave their car, rather than the safety of pedestrians. But that is wrong.

Under this car, there is in fact a very large, icy puddle. If the car was not completely blocking pedestrian access, the small child would end in it up to their ankles, creating a medium-priority cleaning problem for the mum (yes it's cold, wet and muddy, but no bodily fluids are involved). The ice round the fringes of the puddle are exactly the kind of place where someone who relies on a walking stick is likely to slip and injure themselves.

By parking where it has, this driver has selflessy managed to prevent at least one injury and one child cleanup incident. Thank you driver of car W424XUR! thank you for you contribution to child and adult pedestrian safety on our busy streets!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You've snapped my last house!. It was like that all the time I lived there. Even though every property has a garage.

I wonder what the RPZ will do for it? It's all public highway, but never policed - and how would a tow truck operate in such a tight space, anyway?

Anonymous said...

Think most of the cars here daytimes are commuters, maybe even students, who know of the secret parking area.

You'd have to collect reg#s of parked cars and look for london resident parking stickers (=>students), and/or check again weekends to distinguish locals from commuters.

When the RPZ comes out, ticketing would be easier; no need to tow. That would reduce the problem to locals.

WestfieldWanderer said...

In Chipping Sodbury they've taken the pavement parking idea a step further. I thought that you might be interested, as CS has a Bristol postcode it might be relevant to your blog. :-)

SteveL said...

wow, good photos. I've scheduled a post around them for the 16th, linking back to your flickr stream. Glad everyone is OK, it must have been scary. Probably a lot faster than that Nine-tree hill crash though, so not as scary for as long.

SteveL said...

@Quercus, One more thing that's maybe changed since your time there is the parking spaces by the Highbury have extra strong barriers between them. I will have to photo that and explain the cause.