Al Pinkerton
Main Page: Al Pinkerton (Liberal Democrat - Surrey Heath)Department Debates - View all Al Pinkerton's debates with the Department for Transport
Pavement Parking
Al Pinkerton Excerpts(3 days, 13 hours ago)
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Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire) for securing this debate, and for putting another 10p in the meter—that has aged me—to allow the debate to continue. In the interests of time I will limit my comments to two topics. The first is school drop-off and pick-up.
In my community of Surrey Heath we have a major issue with roads and schools that were not designed or built to provide adequate drop-off and pick-up. I am a parent of two children who went to one such school for seven years. I and almost every other parent had to park on the pavement in order to get our kids in and out. That was not because we wanted to be inconsiderate parkers, but because we wanted to keep the carriageway clear to allow vital access routes and roads to remain open.
Dr Arthur
Often we are faced with a dilemma between driver convenience and the safety of pedestrians. I think the safety of pedestrians always has to come first. Parking on the pavement is not an alternative to blocking the road to emergency vehicles. You should not be blocking the road to emergency vehicles and you should not be parking on the pavement. Apologies.
Dr Pinkerton
I would like to engage with the hon. Gentleman’s point more, but I want to try to finish in my original time allocation.
The second key point I will raise is about planning. I recently had a meeting with representatives of a very large house developer that plans to build 1,000 houses in my constituency. They told me that, in the interests of being green, they were only going to supply one parking space per three, four and five-bedroom house, in the hope of encouraging public transport use. I think we all know that will not encourage public transport use; it will hard-bake pavement parking into the future, and with it all the issues that the hon. Member for Edinburgh South West (Dr Arthur) has raised.
I encourage the Government to pick up this issue, to think about making planning regulations much tighter, and to give local authorities the ability to enforce measures against antisocial parking.