Kentish Express Ashford & District
Lorry crackdown shifts parking problem
As we reported several weeks back, Ashford Borough Council seems very pleased with the way its clampdown on illegal lorry parking is going.
A meeting of the borough’s Joint Transportation Board was told that since the lorry clamping pilot was launched in April this year, several (the number wasn’t actually quantified) drivers have been clamped and forced to pay outstanding fines before being released.
Officers also said that the overall impact of the scheme had been a success, with the number of vehicles parking on the Sevington, Orbital Park and Henwood industrial estates significantly dropping over the past five months.
Before the trial started, more than 100 HGVs were counted across the three estates, but this has now been reduced to five by last month.
That’s good news for those THREE industrial estates but less good news for the numerous other industrial estates across Ashford where the problem of a nightly invasion by foreign lorries does not seem to be being tackled by the clamping/ticketing teams.
We know, because they’ve told us, that residents living in places like Wotton Road, South Ashford; near the Cobbs Wood industrial estate and Hothfield have seen no reduction in lorry parking.
In fact there is evidence that all the tough stance at Sevington, Orbital Park and Henwood has done is displace the lorries elsewhere.
A member of the Nuts and Bolts team who walks past Brunswick Road (the section of that road running parallel with Chart Road) each morning said: “You can pretty well guarantee there will be between six and 10 lorries there most nights of the week.
“I did see a couple of enforcement people there once but that certainly hasn’t deterred drivers from stopping there.
“Around the corner in Bridge Road there are often two or three lorries parked up there too, which didn’t use to happen. It’s a bit like getting rid of a wasp’s nest from your garden by dumping it in your neighbour’s garden.”
And there are always ridiculous examples of foreign lorry drivers who end up parking in absolute absurd places. Parking campaigner John Bailey sent us this picture of a massive HGV completely blocking the pavement at the southern end of Blackwall Road South, Willesborough last week.
John told us: “No ticket from Ashford Borough Council. It later moved on and was parked that afternoon on the space opposite the cottages next to the River Stour, blocking their visitor parking.”
Are you the kind of person who looks at something and sees beyond the obvious?
For example you might look at clouds floating across the sky and think one of them looks like the shape or a country or an animal (bear with us – it’s not time to call for the men in white coats yet).
Among those with vivid imaginations is a member of the Nuts and Bolts team who happened to be walking through the Sainsbury’s Bybrook store when a promotional poster on the wall caught his eye.
It was advertising 100% British chickens, but he didn’t quite see it like that.
He thought the image of a chicken’s bottom actually looked equally like the face of a child sleeping.
The jury’s out but see what you think.
Oh what joy that Ashford has two pound shops, well one pound shop and one 99p store to be precise.
When a colleague snapped the arm on a pair of glasses one day last week he realised that he’d left his spare glasses at home. Without glasses he is unable to use a computer screen so a remedy was quickly needed.
Knowing his prescription he was able to pop out to the 99p store and buy a replacement pair of glasses for said amount. Okay they weren’t the smartest pair of glasses you’ll ever come across but neither did he have to shell out the £100 plus that a designer pair from Boots or other opticians would have cost. And if he’d driven home to pick up his spares he would probably have used more than 99p worth of petrol.
What to do for our office Christmas party this year?
That’s the dilemma our team – and no doubt work teams across Ashford – face right now, and it could be a race against time now to get something sorted before everywhere’s booked up.
Last year we went to the Holiday Inn in Canterbury Road for a meal followed by a disco, having gone to the Everest Inn for just a meal, followed by drinks in the pub, for the two years prior to that.
And if we remember rightly the stragglers could well have ended up in Cameo that night too. So it’s a dilemma ... meal/ disco or meal/pub/possibly nightclub or just meal. Or we could do something really crazy like a day trip to France.
But it’s a decision we will have to make, and make soon, and that’s before we even decide whether our Secret Santa this year is going to stay at £1. Decisions, decisions, decisions.