Monday 3 January 2011

RPZ day is coming: Highbury Villas

Jan 3, 2011. RPZ-day minus one. Despite a majority of people outside the new KN RPZ zone being against it, kingsdown and the university quarter are going residents only plus guests tomorrow. We can see the changes, and compare it with previous coverage.

Look at Highbury Villas.

Before: a convenient place for art students to park to stroll into their early afternoon lectures.

Now: double yellow lines, even on the corners, and the bits without yellow are (mostly) for residents only.
Some bits are pay to park, and that's interesting as it adds much more short-stay parking behind the university than the proposed cycle parking area was going to take away. For that subset of students who have money to spend and only want to stay a maximum of two hours, this actually is beneficial. For those who have enough money for a car and fuel but not parking fees, the subset of students who were willing to get to this road before 8am weekdays, a secret parking area for them and commuters has been lost.
People ask what we in Bristol Traffic think about it, are we with the keepparkingfree people?

To be honest, no. Double yellow lines provide extra short stay parking for our vans, and there will be more legal spaces for those with disabled stickers, which, oddly enough, all our vans have. For us, removing the space occupied by commuters increases the semi-legal options for us, while reducing the number of people who will park across corners -people who never think about needs of us transit van owners when they park so insensitively. Then they get upset when we scrape them during the turns. This new zone will provide more parking options for us delivering special products to customers in the area, or nipping in to the newsagents for some more beer and cigarettes (there's a special loading zone there). We feel vaguely sorry for the commuters who will have to park a bit further away to walk in, and if there is an increase in pedestrians in our way, then we will have reason to complain.

3 comments:

Brislington said...

It's interesting that the "dropped kerbs" in Cotham Road now have double-yellow lines across them.

In a less lucid moment, I thought that this was a pointless exercise, but think of the extra revenue?

If this type of scheme were implemented in Brislington, the council would hit the jackpot!

Bristol Traffic said...

Everyone in the area got asked whether they wanted their driveways double yellow lined or not, so those are choices people made.

Coverage of bristlington is welcome, send the photos and text to the usual email address

Bristol Traffic said...

-ooh, just seen your blog. We shall welcome and link to it.