Residents not to blame for parking problems
I WRITE regarding the permanent parking restrictions in the name of safer schools (“Safer school measures to be made permanent”), Leicester Mercury, December 15).
Don’t councillors realise that some people actually have homes on the streets where they are proposing permanent parking restrictions?
Your report states that teachers and parents welcome these restrictions, suggesting they have already been consulted, but there is no mention of the residents’ responses, not just to those mentioned in your article, but to other proposals I uncovered recently by way of a Freedom of Information Act query. Residents are having restrictions imposed in a very punitive fashion.
Residents are not the cause of the problems but are just as much the victims and yet appear to be at the bottom of the ladder of consideration and may well be the last to be consulted and with the minimum of notice.
It is true that people do not live on all the roads which enable access to schools. The restrictions on these particular roads will only affect car users dropping off or picking up pupils, in other words the cause of the problems.
A variety of restrictions all over the city are in the pipeline, but all will have to be enforced. Is it not better to have residents-only parking? Then at least the bill for enforcement will be partially paid by the charges for the permits and residents may be better able to accommodate overnight guests. Will there be any exemptions for residents at all?
My street has increasingly become a service road and car park for a school and its users. It has been subject to “temporary” parking restrictions during the Covid pandemic and, again, under the city council’s “safer schools” initiative.
There has been little or no enforcement, resulting in school pick-ups and drop-offs continuing to cause major problems, even with double yellow lines, with parents and carers as pedestrians spilling over onto the street, adding to the issue.
Such restrictions are knee-jerk reactions. They are lacking in any depth of thought by people in offices who are divorced from reality and are informed with snapshots of and flying visits to view “everyday life”.
Ultimately, such draconian measures are treated with contempt and offenders disappear before enforcement officers arrive to ticket them.
Rather than pussyfooting around and bringing in punitive measures against the people who live on these roads and still leaving pedestrians at risk, why doesn’t the council resolve the problems once and for all?
Please give proper consideration to redesigning school entrances and access for all school users preferably within the school boundaries themselves but certainly off main access routes for dwellings.
Near my neighbouring school there are two obvious choices – one, where there is already hard standing and the other, which was supposedly part of the original plans for the school some forty years ago, which was on the inside of the perimeter fence!
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