Tuesday 4 January 2011

RPZ day has arrived

Over in London, the Politicians tell the BBC that the war on motorists is over, and the BBC believes them, naively, unquestioningly, because they want it to be true. We know different. No, we aren't talking about fuel price rises, because we've seen the forthcoming price rises on trains and buses -which will go up more believe us.

No, we are talking about the war on motoring that is resident parking.


Today is  the big day - the Kingsdown RPZ is live. We hear some of the locals will be going to a pub to celebrate -presumably now they can drive there and back again.

We also hear that for the first few days the council will be issuing warning notes, not tickets; we'll see how that goes.

It's going to reduce the value of those houses where more than 40% of the house volume is dedicated to parking, especially as the council only issues one RPZ permit if you already have an off-road parking option. Try to explain to the parking services dept. that your garage isn't for parking as you are growing a large quantity of high-yield marijuana there and see if they care.


This actually reduces the value of all houses who turned their gardens into tarmac. What was a feature is now possibly a liability.

What about the bicycle parking that some houses have? Where does that fit in here? Should we be able to impose a limit on the number of bicycles that a household in the area has?

How can the government say the war on motorists is over when there is no limit on the number of bicycles people own in the inner city?

2 comments:

Adam said...

There's usually a self appointed bicycle ownership regulator in each house isn't there? I only know of one couple who have a joint bike acquisition 'problem' and their house is fairly full. Usually it evens itself out with one partner keeping the other in check.

Of course you could get around the "there's not enough space for seven bikes in this house" issue by using on-street parking solutions. Do bike storage devices such as this... http://www.treehugger.com/bikestorage1.jpg need a permit too or is it only motorised vehicles?

nfo said...

I can report that further into Cotham, the RPZ streets are presently eerily empty of cars, whilst the neighboring non-RPZ streets have cars parked on the pavements, too close to junctions and on double yellows.

Not a particularly surprising outcome...