Pavement parking and weak campaigning

There have been legislative moves afoot to try to change the absurd situation in the UK (outside London) that parking is generally legal on pavements, though driving is not. (So obviously all the cars parked on pavements must have landed there from the sky.) A Private Member's Bill was proposed that would bring the law in England generally into line with that applying to London; that is, parking on pavements would be made illegal except where the Local Authority has put up signs and painted markings showing where it is permitted.

Typical legal pavement parking in the London Borough of Brent (Village Way, Neasden). It's OK because signs allow it on the right-hand side. But note the illegal double parking on the left-hand side, where the bays are marked on the road, but parking is doubled up on the pavement as well. This is typical of what happens when you erode the concept of the footway in this way.

The Private Members Bill has now been withdrawn following a commitment from the Government to look at the issue, MP Simon Hoare said:

Following detailed discussions, I have withdrawn the bill today following The Minister’s commitment to convene a round table and undertake a policy review. 

This response demonstrates the Government’s commitment to improving access for all pedestrians including disabled and vulnerable people. A government examination of the current issues gives us the best opportunity of securing Government backing for legislative change.

Apparently the Govenment need to "undertake a policy review with stakeholders to examine the legal and financial implications of an alternative regime and the likely impact on local authorities".

This sounds rather fancy, when a simple-minded person like me might think it is absolutely clear that pavements are there for walking on and cars should not be parked on them.

A coalition of charities including Guide Dogs and Living Streets was backing Simon Hoare's bill. However, his bill in no way proposed a blanket ban on pavement parking, he said:

The bill will simply enable local authorities to deal with problem areas in an efficient way. It just provides another tool in the armoury for local government.

The thing that strikes me about all this is how it's a classic example of weak campaigning. There's an extraordinary kow-towing to motordom here, everyone apologetically and oh so 'reasonably' trying to accommodate the convenience of selfish car derivers at the expense of the majority. The campaign should be to sweep away all parking on pavements, pure and simple. But no-one in the political mainstream or 'civil society' is saying this. Yes, these worthy organisations say, let's have Simon Hoare's feeble bill, or something even weaker the Government might come up with after a few years of consulting with 'stakeholders' (who will include such statutory loonies as the Alliance of British Drivers), in order to make the pavements of Burslem and Basildon just as delightful for walking as the cracked-up, routinely obstructed pavements of Brent. Plus ça change.

When I was a member of Camden Cycling Campaign, we had a clear line on pavement parking, which we held to in all discussions with Camden Council. This was that pavement parking is wrong: it messes up the environment, produces shabby streets, and obstructs pedestrians. If it was felt that there was insufficient parking for demands, and there was excess pavement (not common in Camden), then we said the Council should rebuild the kerbs to provide clear, dedicated parking bays that were not part of the pavement. This was the line that was repeatedly put to the council's Walking, Road Safety and Cycling Advisory Group, consisting of councillors and representatives of community organisations. The pedestrian campaigners and residents' associations seemed to back this line, and, as a result, Camden has to this day very little pavement parking. Faced with a choice between expensively rebuilding kerbs, and not giving in to the pressure to provide more parking, the council unsurprisingly tended to go with the latter option – which is why the kind of mess you see in the Brent street pictured above is uncommon in the neighbouring Borough of Camden.

How Camden has organised parking in Russell Square, WC1. This is a good example: the parking is not on the footway, but on a designated, differently-paved area.

There is something a bit attractive for cycle campaigning in the notion of pavement parking, because it means that on minor roads, such as the one pictured above, a clearer space on the road is created and cyclists are less likely to get squeezed and intimidated by car drivers trying to pass them. However, the real answer for streets like these is to follow the Dutch paradigm and remove them from the through-traffic network. When narrow, parked-up streets are no longer rat runs, and motor traffic is reduced to essential access only, the problem of 'squeezing' is largely eliminated, even with substantial permitted on-strteet parking. If there is still a problem of accommodating the parking, because the street is very narrow, it really should be made one-way for motor traffic (not for cycling). This won't work for cycling in the normal UK paradigm, where a lot of through-traffic is still allowed, indeed encouraged, on narrow one-way streets, but arranging the one-ways to eliminate through-traffic will create streets with adequate capacity for all, that are spacious enough and have sufficiently little traffic to be an unthreatening cycling environment.

A minor one-way road in Assen, Netherlands

This type of environment is where the much-abused concept of Shared Space rightly belongs, in minor roads whose design should be orientated to those who live and play in them, and sometimes need to park cars as well.

An example of a 'home-zone' street in Groningen, Netherlands

David Hembrow has a blogpost with further pictures of how car parking is treated on Dutch residential streets, where it is often removed from the carraigeway, but given a distinct space that is not in the way of pedestrains and cannot damage the surface on which they walk. These Dutch designs do not look like the half-on, half-off, painted-lines-with-blue-signs London-type pavement parking messes.

In the UK it seems the general thinking is that parking on the pavement is a legitimate part of a 'settlement' vis-a-vis motoring and walking whereby motorists are allowed to park on the pavements when they feel like it, or it appears to be necessary so as not to obstruct the flow of traffic, but pedestrians are always free to walk in the road, as we have no concept of 'jaywalking' in our law. This is obviously pretty unsatisfactory to anyone of limited mobility or particularly vulnerability, such as the blind, or the mother with a pushchair. It mirrors the attitude to cycling, which is to allow it everywhere on roads, except on motorways and in a few other places, but to accept that as sufficient 'payment' to cyclists and therefore exonerate the authorities from needing to provide for cycling properly as a mode in its own right. Both of these 'settlements', the walking one and the cycling one, short-change the vulnerable road users and cement the domination of the car, though they seem very free and fair, from a certain traditional anglo-saxon point of view. 'We don't need any of those fussy foreign rules about where you are allowed to walk and cycle, you're free here', said John Bull, maybe. Yes. Free to be run over anywhere.

I've linked a few times here to David Hembrow's blog on Dutch cycling, and he also has view about campaigning for the right things, and not those that seem like 'achievable goals' or a 'first step'. I've consistently advocated that UK cycle campaigners should not ask for inadequate solutions, but think big. This message seems to have got through, and cycle campaigners have been making much bigger demands than they used to, in the days when the earlier posts on this blog were written, with striking success in some places. As my previous post about London's emerging segregated cycle network showed, we've started to get the ambitions things, that really make a difference, that we demanded, because of an adherence to clear, justifiable principles and an unwillingness to compromise over them.

It seems to me that pedestrian campaigning is still at an earlier stage, the stage where cycle campaigning was decades ago. It's not political enough, not clear enough in its demands, it's too polite and too compromising, and not asking for the right things. For example, you'll search in vain on the Living Streets website for any reference to the inadequacies of UK traffic law and the Highway Code in relationship to the how pedestrians are treated at junctions. There's no campaign to bring the UK into line with the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic, the failure to apply which makes the difference between UK signalised crossroads, where any pedestrian attempting to cross without a specific signal risks getting run over (and blamed for it), and the equivalent in most of continental Europe, where the pedestrian automatically gets priority over turning traffic (often re-enforced with zebra markings). Just to bring this into UK law and practice would far make more of a difference to walking here than all Living Streets' favoured issues such as ice, the time zone (yes, really, that's trying to make pedestrians safer, not by controlling danger, but by making us do things at a different astronomical time), and the (rather more sensible) 20mph campaign.

The current pro-pedestrain campaigns won't make the real difference they needs to, like the weak cycle campaigns of yesteryear, with their reliance on asking for mutual respect and poor but uncontroversial infrastructure like Advanced Stop Lines. Pedestrian campaigning should be virtually one with the cycling movement in demanding a complete re-design of our physical transport environment and re-thinking of the balance of rights and responsibilities accorded to motorists and vulnerable road users. The pro-pedestrian, pro-cycling, 'urbanist' and 'better streets' campaigns should all be virtually identical in their demands, and mutually supporting, and would be so much stronger if that were the case. But it is hard to see a transition to this situation when the largest part of this potential coalition is as reluctant to challenge the motor-centric status-quo as standard pedestrian campaigning in the UK still seems to be.

More Brent pavement parking, and Exhibition Road

A correspondent living in Australia (it's nice to get an outside view from another Anglo-Saxon country), commenting on my last post, said:

I cannot believe the state-sanctioned dystopic practice of car parking on pavements.

That's a good way to put it. Parking on pavements is "dystopic" because it produces an ugly street environment, it damages the pavements, making them hazardous for pedestrains, it messes up the distinction between roadway and pavement, eroding, in the minds of motorists, the principle that the carriageway is the place for parking and the pavement (or sidewalk) the place for walking, and it leads to a chaotic situation where, in a place like north Brent, where parking pressure is very high, because of the urban density and the poor quality of non-motorised transport alternatives, people start parking their cars everywhere.

We see this in the euphemistically-named Village Way in Neaden NW10. This is the "spine" road in the rather un-village like residential area sometimes referred to as Neasden Village, a group of streets isolated from the rest of the borough by the North Circular Road to the east, the underground lines and depot to the south, the A4088 to the north, and the River Brent and the Grand Union Feeder Canal to the west. It is, as I pointed out recently, a deeply inaccessible place for those not using a car as their main mode of transport. This is another road in which Brent Council have designated on-pavement parking space using white lines and small blue signs.

Village Way, Neaden

Parking has only been permitted on the right-hand pavement in this view, but motorists have started parking on the opposite pavement as well. Parking is explicitly marked out on the roadway on the left-hand pavement, but they are parking on the pavement and the roadway as well, creating two lines of parking alongside one another. On the side-road off here, West Way, parking has been permitted on both pavements, so maybe that is why the motorists are thinking that they are allowed to park on all pavements in this group of streets.

West Way, Neaden

I think that when councils start down this "dystopic" road of confusing pavement with car-parking space, it just leads to a general erosion of respect for all pavements by motorists. It is analogous to that other shoddy, cheap practice councils employ, of creating "shared use" areas on pavements for cycling, which also erodes the sanctity of the pavements for pedestrians, leads to confusion and cycling on pavements where it has not been permitted, and fails to provide safe conditions for cyclists as well (particularly at junctions). That subject has just been covered nicely by the At War with the Motorist blog.

When I was active in Camden Cycling Campaign, we had regular meetings with councillors and officers in a forum called the Walking, Cycling and Road Safety Advisory Group. Being advisory, this group did not create council policy, but it had the potential to influence it. It was (and I presume still is) dominated not by cyclists, but by pedestrian and local amenity groups. There were always some conflicts of opinion between cycling and walking representatives, but one thing that all could agree on was the undesirability of parking on pavements. The view that this group consistently put to councillors was that, though the conversion of pavement to parking space was generally undesirable, should it be that certain streets really did have an unnecessary excess of pavement, and there was a politically impossible-to-resist local demand for more parking, then it would be preferable to rebuild the kerbs to transfer pavement space to the road, rather than marking parking on pavements.

I do not know whether this idea was ever formally accepted as Camden Council policy, but it seemed to have an effect. To have such a policy would immediately put a big damper on moves to transfer pavement space to parking, because to do it properly in this way would be far more expensive than painting lines, and officers would certainly think hard before recommending it. It does seem to be the case that Camden has far less pavement parking than Brent, and other boroughs, to this day, despite the huge inner-city parking pressure, so kudos should go to Camden Council for resisting the easy option of allowing motorists to take over the pavements. Camden also was the only council in London ever in a significant way to transfer road space to cycle tracks. Again, this was because Camden Cycling Campaign insisted that it did not want cycle facilities to be created at the expense of pedestrian space.

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One road where parking on pavements is impossible, because the pavements, in the sense of footways raised above road level, have been abolished, is the newly-rebuilt Exhibition Road in South Kensington. I paid a visit there this week to see how it is working. The results are rather different to what I expected. When it was being built, I expected the central line of pointed lamp columns to define the northbound and southbound carriageways all the way from Hyde Park to Cromwell Road. What has happened, rather, and I don't know if this was intended by the original designers, or was a later modification, or has just evolved, is that the road is in two parts, north of the junction with Prince Consort Road, and south of it. (I am ignoring the stub of Exhibition road south of Cromwell Road, which is effectively pedestrianised.)

There is a funny kind-of-roundabout at the Prince Consort Road junction, and, north of this, the two directions of traffic go on opposite sides of the lamp columns. South of it, both directions of traffic are on the east side of the columns. On this stretch, the west side is occupied with diagonal parking, Boris Bikes, and benches, with the space between all that and the building line acting as pavement. On the east side of the road the effective pavement all the way down is defined by the drainage grating and tactile surface, plus some trees and bollards. Though these features are present on the west side, they are only functioning to establish the effective pavement north of the roundabout.

Exhibition Road west side looking north from the Science Museum

Exhibition Road west side looking south from the Science Museum

Exhibition road east side looking south from the Henry Cole wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum

The whole thing seems to me to be complex, cluttered, and, well, pretty much as far from a "naked street" as it is possible to get. There clearly is still "carriageway" and "footway" here, they have just been marked off in an unconventional way. There is no "sharing" between pedestrains and motorists, to speak of, and the normal relationship between motorists and cyclists prevails, though the street is more pleasant than it used to be because of the 20 mph limit. The funny roundabout where the road-use changes, but without the lining and signing one would expect, causes drivers a lot of doubt about what they are supposed to be doing here. Such confusion is held to be a good thing by some of those arguing the Shared Space line. This thinking however, as I have pointed out before, as well as having a "black is white" quality, is at variance with the European road safety mainstream, as summarised in the EU's PRESTO Cycling Policy Guide (p 18):

Creating recognizable and comprehensible traffic situations is essential for safety. Consistent design solutions on roads with similar functions (in terms of road hierarchy) makes potential conflict situations more predictable for cyclists and other users, while also inciting everyone to behave more predictably.

Of the many blogposts to appear commenting on the new Exhibition Road, one of the most memorable was that by Londonneur, who compared the paving to "a giant Argyle sock laid down in the road". The price of this Argyle sock, and oddly placed benches and parking, was around £30 million. I reckon that should have been enough, alternatively, estimating at £7 million a mile, for one high-quality, capacious, safe, segregated cycle highway right across central London from Paddington to the City: just what Camden Cycling Campaign proposed 14 years ago, with their Seven Stations Link idea, the only part of which that was ever implemented (in badly compromised fashion) being the cycle track through Bloomsbury. Think how that scheme would have transformed London if carried out in full.

Then again, the Dutch built the longest cycle bridge in the world, the Nescio Bridge (to British designs, ironically), in 2005, for less than £10 million at today's prices. So we could have had three of those across the Thames for the price of Exhibition Road. Think of what that would have done for cycling in London. We continue to wait for a proper cycle route across London, and for safe river crossings for cyclists, while extraordinary sums are spent on odd, bodged public space "transformation" compromises like Exhibition Road, Piccadilly and Haymarket (£14 million), and the next one the Mayor intends, Euston Circus (cost unknown).

Next Saturday, thousands of London cyclists will congregate in the middle of London to tell the next Mayor that they want Streets as safe and inviting for cycling as those in Holland. It's pretty obvious that we have both the money and the space in London to achieve this aim, and in a relatively short time too. As always, we await only the political vision.

A damp but colourful Spring Clean, and pavement parking in Brent

I am sure Climate Rush's Spring Clean protest against London's filthy air quality, and against Boris Johnson's policy of trying to conceal the problem by gluing the pollution particles to the roads by treating them with calcium magnesium acetate powder near monitoring stations, would have attracted a much larger crowd, had not London been deluged with heavy rain for most of the day on Thursday. As it was, a small but spirited and colourful crowd marched from DEFRA in Smith Square to Parliament Square waving feather dusters and banners, to make the point that obeying the UK's legally-binding international treaty obligations on clean air should not be regarded as optional by the government and the Mayor of London. The lives of those who die because of our polluted air (estimates range from between 19,000 and 29,000 per year for the UK) should not be treated so lightly.

Spring Cleaners at DEFRA in Smith Square

Feather dusters to the fore at Pasrliament Square. The police would not allow an occupation of a lane of Westmister Bridge, so a picnic was held in the square instead.

Another group who seem to think that obeying the law is optional are some of Brent Council's drivers. Here I witnessed not one, but two of Brent's vehicles parked on the pavement in Stag Lane NW9. The more distant one is clearly making the footway impassable.

Brent Council minibuses on Stag Lane

Perhaps the drivers of these vehicles have become confused about the function of the footways because of the way in which Brent, along with many other authorities, is now designating parts of them, in many places, for parking, as here, not far away, in Church Lane, Kingsbury NW9.

Church Lane NW9

I have looked up Brent's criteria for deciding where the designation of footway parking is appropriate.
It says here:

Brent Council has the power to exempt certain streets from the regulations to enable drivers to park either partially or fully on the footway to maintain the safe flow of traffic. At the same time, the conditions must be right to protect pedestrians, so where exemptions are granted, there is sufficient access for pedestrians without being forced into the road. There are certain criteria which have to be met before a street is granted exemption and they have been approved by Brent Council's Highway Committee.

So it's to do with maintaining "the safe flow of traffic". But here is a wider view of the street in question.

This pavement parking exemption is clearly just here to allow parking outside this small parade of shops to be doubled up, both sides of the service road, and still allow space for a car or van to get through. There is in fact pavement parking allowed on both sides of the service road.This has nothing to do with maintaining a "safe flow of traffic". The flow of traffic on the road is unconnected with this, being maintained by the presence of double yellow lines. And note how the word "traffic" is here being used implicitly to mean "motor vehicles", not pedestrians or cyclists. And note, again, the enormous total width available on this road, as so often in suburban north Brent, but that clearly there is not seen to be the space available for any sort of cycle facilities. Well, there are "cycle facilities", if you include cycle parking stands with that phrase. The part of the pavement that remains after the chunk taken out of it by the car parking has also been used for these curious, newly-installed stands by the "Biking Borough".

But that's not what I mean by "cycle facilities". For Church Lane is a difficult and intimidating street to cycle along, being a rat run, with high speeds, intermittent blocks of parking and stopping buses which a cyclist needs to pull out around into the 30+ mph traffic stream, wide lanes in both directions encouraging these high speeds, with occasional pinch points at the pedestrian islands where drivers tend to try to overtake cyclists dangerously, and prevalent poor driving standards, the norm in north Brent. By "cycle facilities" I mean space in which to cycle with a measure of subjective safety, which would mean cycle lanes or cycle tracks. The space is clearly there, but the street would need some rearranging to accommodate them. At present, it is arranged to allow lots of parking, and excess space on the road, which leads to speeding. Note how none of the several cycle stands are in use, in the middle of a working day. This is a measure of how little cycling there is here, itself a measure of the bad environment.

But to go back to Brent's pavement parking "exception criteria", we read:

• Exemption to be granted only where parking of vehicles wholly within the carriageway reduces the carriageway width to less than 3 metres.
• A minimum footway width of 1.2 metres be available for pedestrians.
• Roads in shopping and other busy pedestrian areas not to be considered.

There are more criteria, you can read them if you wish. But note that the first three have all been disregarded here. The parking of vehicles wholly in the carriageway would not reduce the width of the carriageway to less than 3 metres, even if it were allowed on both sides, because the carriageway is the main road, not the service road. And even if you interpret carriageway as the service road, which I think is technically wrong, you could still have more than 3 metres width, with parking, if you put double-yellow lines on one side. There is no law, national or local, which says you need parking on both sides of a narrow service road.

The second criteria is also broken: there is not 1.2 metres available for pedestrians on the outer pavement. Look at the placing of the tree in the first picture of the row of parked cars. And, clearly, this is a shopping area, so the third criterion is violated.

I would like to know why Brent's traffic planners are ignoring the council's own criteria for allowing pavement parking. Of course, I know why. It is due to political pressure. There is a recession on. There are lots of small local shops going out of business. There is a prevailing public feeling here, in the outer suburbs, that trade for small shops is inextricably linked to the availability of car parking, and that parking restrictions, and even parking charges, are a contributory factor in businesses going under. There is a feeling that these shops cannot compete with supermarkets, with shopping centres like Brent Cross and Westfield, and with the retail sheds, for the want of the practically unlimited free parking that these provide. I have encountered this view at the Brent Council local Consultative Forum for this area. The alternative view, that of course I have tried to put, that most shoppers, even in these car-dependent suburbs, do not actually arrive by car, and that dedicating the streets to cars in this way produces an uninviting shopping environment for those using bus, foot, and bike, gets very little shrift.

The truth is that shops are having a hard time irrespective of parking regimes, and they would be having a hard time if there was not a recession. People don't have to go to shops now. I rarely do so. There is the on-line alternative, for everything. The more unpleasant the streets are made, to try to pack in more parked cars, the less shopping I will do in small local shops like these. I suspect I am not alone in this. To compete with the internet and the shopping malls, the small parades of suburban shops need to be able to provide something better than this inconvenient shabbiness on the fringes of a dangerous rat-run. And that's down to local authorities having a bit more backbone, and planning vision, than this.