The West Norwood Action Group: Chairman Jeremy Galloway
[
home ]
[gen@fenn.demon.co.uk]URL: [http://www.fenn.demon.co.uk] Last updated 17 February 1998
If you have come here looking for assistance in understanding and respoding to a resident's-only parking scheme consultation, I have left this here for inspiration. Good luck!
February 1998 -- Lambeth announced it would introduce parking restrictions in the West Norwood area of the borough. But it had completely misread the feeling of the local residents and businesses
16th February 1998 -- 150+ Residents and businesses meet one of the planners and their councillors to discuss what they think. No-one was in favour of the scheme.
April 1998 -- Scheme withdrawn, a modified and heavily scaled-back scheme was planned.
2000 -- A very limited scheme was introduced after Lambeth consultated a transport planning consultancy. It comprised a few dozen limted-waiting bays by the High Street and train station. Not surprsingly, the much smaller scheme works. Traffic wardens are supposedly self-financing.
Why did Lambeth think its a good idea?
Why did the residents and businesses think it is wrong?
What did residents and businesses want?
Lambeth Environmental Services wanted to introduce a restricted parking scheme similar to those in many inner London areas:
a £65 annual parking fee to park in local streets - or 12 monthly instalments of £120 in total
new yellow lines on streets - reducing the amount of space available for legal parking
a maximum of 50 Visitors’ Permits per household, for £125 or pay and display bays with 4 hour limits
Lambeth wanted to introduce this scheme throughout West Norwood and Herne Hill - affecting residents, visitors, & local businesses.
Why did Lambeth want to do this?
Some people protested that it’s difficult to park outside their homes because of shoppers’ and commuters’ cars.
Lambeth hoped to reduce traffic by stopping local or out-of-area commuters driving to local train stations.
Lambeth wanted to stop people from driving to local offices and factories.
Many residents thought this parking scheme missed the point
There were no statistics to justify a scheme of this magnitude. Lambeth did not have statistics on the number of complaints. It does not know how many people 'park & ride' or drive to work.
There was a traffic / parking problem along Knights Hill to the South Circular Road, but this scheme would impose parking restrictions in distant, near-empty residential roads
The question was asked, "Why should people who live away from the congested roads have expensive parking restrictions forced upon them?" Most of these roads are only ever busy at night, outside the hours of the scheme.
The scheme has been described as 'a sledgehammer to crack a nut' and 'an inner-city solution where it isn't needed'
The proposed scheme would damage the local businesses
With no local parking, shoppers would go elsewhere. What happens to shops with no customers?
Employees who work in the area don’t qualify for a parking place unless they use their car on company business, even then they would have to pay £255 for a Business Permit
The detail of the scheme was muddled
Lambeth had not consulted the Fire Brigade or Ambulance Service about these proposals
It said there were mistakes in the maps that they sent out to households
The position of parking bays was inconvenient for the locals it was supposed to serve: the location of resident-only bays, shared parking bays, and the absence of motorcycle bays showed the planners hadn’t studied our streets.
Many proposed parking bays would block driveways to houses with garages.
A permit would not guarantee a parking space
If you couldn’t afford an annual payment of £65, Lambeth would charge you £120 for monthly instalments
Would there be enough permits? How would Lambeth administer the scheme?
Visitors’ Permits would be needed - each day-time visit by a daughter, home-help, builder, or friend would cost £2.50 (but they would be rationed to 50 visits) How much would permits be next year?
What did local residents and businesses want?
Residents want to continue to be able to park outside their homes
Local employees wanted free (or very cheap) long-term parking so they could continue to work cheaply
Businesses wanted loading facilities, and for customers to park reasonably locally for their heavy shopping. They wanted their customers to be unafraid of getting parking tickets.
They all hoped that the businesses within the town centre would be allowed to continue, while hopefully not slowing down through-traffic any more than it was. The original thought was for a limited number of High Street changes, introducing small numbers of pay-and-display parking, re-introducing a shoppers' car park, and a review of the yellow lines.
West Norwood is a predominantly residential area at the southern tip of the London Borough of Lambeth. It is frequently overlooked by the council in Brixton, who manage diverse areas of the borough.The High Street area runs north-south and is frequently congested, like most other city streets. West Norwood does have some industrial zones, located in areas off the High Street and and towards Gipsy Hill to the East.
The High Street has a large number of local shops and amenities, which have a loyal local trade supplemented by passing motorists. The High Street was largely single- or double-yellow lines, however it is frequently used for short term parking.
There are three main railway stations in the area affected by the scheme. There are a limited amount of commuters who use the local streets for parking en-route to their respective train stations.
In 1996 Lambeth commissioned Halcrow Fox & Associates to study traffic in the area. Some tactical changes of pedestrian crossings and signals came about as a result which helped to maintain the flow of through traffic. Around this time Lambeth also sold off some High Street parking spaces for commercial use.
In 1998 Lambeth councillors, after complaints and agitation from some local residents and West Norwood Action Group, commisioned their officers to design a parking plan for the town centre. (Although many political parties would prefer to deny any involvement now, it seems that most participants were wholly in favour of the idea. Any opposition would have stemmed from the idea of spending money at the far end of the borough).
At the time all of the involved parties seem to have thought that the end result would be a limited number of pay-and-display parking bays around the High Street area. Everyone would be happy. Somehow this message seems to have got lost and the officers planned a scheme that affected almost the whole area, several square miles north-south from Knights Hill to Herne Hill.
In February 1998 Lambeth's officers delivered maps to houses within proposed zones, with the intention of rubber-stamping the High Street plan (called the Satellite zone) in March, and implementing the residential scheme soon after. The public "consultation" was very much rushed through, as they believed they local support. This belief was proved false very quickly.
There was a public outcry, and a meeting convened in a local pub. Several councillors were present, having been tipped off by their constituents.
They realised very quickly that this scheme had no strong local support, and, it being only a few months away from local elections, were motivated to block the development in Council.
The borough planners engaged consultants who:
suggested the introduction of a few short-term (20-minute) parking bays in the main road and its corners.
protected the existing short-term parking facilities
introduced and adjusted the timing on local traffic lights
The end result was a limited alleviation of previous problems: whilst not a pancea, it did not aggravate the current issues.
This is fairly typical of Metropolitan road improvement schemes - blanket schemes driven by dogma are inevitably doomed to failure. Subtle improvements on the existing infrastructure normally have much better results (after all, we might presume that most of the current systems were developed for a reason...?)
However, as residents in other local areas have discovered, Council planners are driven by dogma and have short memories. Within two years of the West Norwood scheme being rejected, they had proposed identical schemes to the East and South of West Norwood, and then various parts of Streatham. Eath times they discovered that the residents objected strongly. However, it took a number of highly motivated locals to fight back against the schemes.
home ]
[gen@fenn.demon.co.uk]