Parking spot of bother
WHAT is it about us Brits and our parking spaces?
There is a mentality in a worrying amount of people that the street directly outside their house is theirs to park on and theirs alone.
Their home is not just a castle, it’s a country, whose borders includes the road and verge outside the front door or gate, and for others to park there is the equivalent of putting a tank on their lawn.
Except it’s not a lawn, it’s a public road, by law accessible to all and maintained through taxes paid by everybody. But try telling them that.
Last week there was evidence that it’s a national syndrome with the story about a student nurse on placement at Royal Preston Hospital, who had parked legally on an adjacent street, having to leave a note in the windscreen begging local residents to stop vandalising her car. She works for free and cannot afford to pay for parking at the hospital.
When the story went public it resulted in a flurry of comments from NHS staff reporting similar abuse, from verbal attacks to criminal damage.
It’s not quite that bad down our road but I recognise the misplaced sense of entitlement at its core, which turns normally civil people into puce-faced Rottweilers.
We’ve had visitors come who parked up the road and on returning to their cars found rude notes left on the windscreen.
The strangest thing is one of the biggest culprits is in all other ways the nicest and most helpful of people. My partner’s mum – in her 80s – parked outside his house once and he was out like a shot, all but sticking in a gum shield as he finger pointed his way towards her.
Yet days later he was offering me a lift as I walked by him on the street, while his is the go-to house for postman when people aren’t at home to receive large parcels.
Another strand to it is what seems an utter disregard to all other road users.
We park our car on the drive. Other people up and down the street aren’t quite so considerate. They usually park one vehicle across the front of their drive and the other just behind it.
Drives exist to ensure the free flow of traffic on suburban roads which can be narrow and are becoming more important with the increasing amount of two-car households these days.
If you park in front of them, you gum up the works. Worse still they leave both their vehicles on the street come what may, even if there’s already a car parked nearby, and in so doing they effectively block the road.
Let’s hope nobody ever needs an ambulance because it might not get through – or in the case of the roads near the Royal Lancashire, there might not be any nurses at work as they’re too busy dealing with their vandalised cars.