Temporary barriers to go by Christmas
Town centre: Measures were introduced to aid social distancing
Temporary barriers which were introduced last year are set to be removed by Christmas, a town forum was told.
On Thursday,
November 4, Neil Walter, parking manager for the Royal Borough, said the barriers along York Road, Queen Street and King Street will be removed.
It comes as councillors from both sides of the (virtual) chamber raised concerns over the accessibility of the town’s on-street parking.
Barriers were put up in June 2020 to aid social distancing as the town prepared to reopen after the first lockdown.
Whilst widened footpaths created more room for pedestrians, some business owners blasted the barriers due to heightened congestion and a lack of on-street parking in the town centre.
Mr Walter said: “One of the things we’re currently working on is the active travel measures which were put in place throughout Maidenhead to assist the easing back of town centres.
“Obviously what we’ve now done is we’ve agreed that all of those measures should be removed, and that parking, taxi bays, bus stops and things like that should be returned to what they were originally to ease our town centres back and to increase the amount of available on-street parking for our residents.
“[The measures] have helped especially after the first lockdown as town centres started to reopen in the summer of 2020, and enabled residents to use larger areas of footways and cycle paths.
“But obviously, as the town becomes busier again, we really do need to return some of those bays back to their original parking status, mainly due to a loss of spaces elsewhere.
Mr Walter added that the removal of the barriers would bring back ‘somewhere in the region of around 20’ on-street parking spaces across the town.
Later in the meeting, Mr Walter said that ‘exactly the same’ number of disabled parking bays had been put back into the town centre after the St Ives Road car park was lost due to redevelopment.
Councillors John Baldwin (Lib Dem, Belmont) and Greg Jones (Con, Riverside) had concerns over the accessibility of parking in the town centre.
Cllr Baldwin said: “The sentiment that I’m receiving from residents is that whilst the number of accessible parking spaces might be close to being the same as it was before, they’re further away from the town centre and therefore the accessibility is reduced – they seem to have been pushed further away from the town centre.”
Mr Walter said the areas which had been redeveloped were ‘popular areas for both on-street and off-street parking’ and that the ability for the council to replace parking in such areas was ‘extremely difficult’.
Cllr Jones told the forum of the feedback he had received from the Older Persons Advisory Forum.
He said: “The feedback I get from them is that, in Maidenhead, just nipping into town and going to the shops and picking up something quickly and easily is really difficult.
“There aren’t that many on-street free parking spaces, and it really feels that way as well.
“If you go to the back of Marks and Spencer, there used to be six to eight spaces, there aren’t anymore. At the end of the High Street, there used to be a few spaces, there aren’t anymore.”
He added that in a map provided to him by the Project Centre, 82 street signs in Maidenhead had some form of parking restriction as opposed to ‘only 17 which allowed free on-street parking from half-an-hour to a couple of hours’.
Mr Walter said the 17 signs accounted parking bays for ‘approximately 60 vehicles’.
He addied: “It’s extremely difficult, but we will always maintain that level of approximately 60 limited waiting spaces throughout the town.”