please empty your brain below

No matter how inner or outer you are, living near a hospital has to be a great pain as well. There are some serious parking restrictions in a 5-10 minute walk around all of them.
I wonder if the new cargo delivery bikes are exempt. Perhaps they would be able to park on the pavement without blocking pedestrians.
This kind of restriction also has an impact on people who need regular care or medical visits. Communities should be about people before traffic flow.
I now see what those Amazon Boxes are for. I’d thought they were to stop other members of your household seeing what your buying 😉
This web page is taking forever to load.
As well as residents being seriously inconvenienced, delivery drivers often have to pay the cost of parking fines themselves.
I suppose if someone is moving home, or having a grand piano delivered, one option might be to apply for a dispensation to allow parking which would otherwise be illegal. For a red route that is £48.
On the flip side, if you're in Manchester or another place without red routes/any enforcement, there's no problems. Delivery drivers and private cars can park literally anywhere without fear of sanction from citizens trying to get around or local government and their enforcers. Cycle lane? No, it's a parking lane. Pavement? Unload as you need. /rant

We need a happy and safe medium for the time challenged delivery driver, whose fragile employment incentivises them to make the most expedient choice at the cost of others and having cities that aren't completely anti-delivery...
I live out in the “sticks”, with no restriction at all, but still find that delivery drivers, especially down the “Evri / my herpes” (or whatever they are called this week) end of market will do anything they can to avoid making the simplest of deliveries/: they get lost, don’t press the bell, drive past once and bugger off, not be able to find the area at all, deliver to a random house 1/2 a mile away etc etc, and they can park right outside my house, so you must never be able to buy anything on eBay or similar as you’re simply never going to get it without a load of Hastle or trip down to the petrol station!
I think one thing that really needs to change is that delivery drivers need both time and trollies.

They need time to park a couple of minutes walk away where there's actually room without blocking pavements/cycle lanes, and they need trollies to wheel heavy things for a minute or two. Sadly I don't see that happening.
I wonder if we're at peak parcel delivery, there has been talk that with a tighter labour market these poorly paid jobs look less attractive. On top road user charging will have to begin within a decade to replace fuel duty. So this will only lead to home delivery being more expensive than it is today. Companies like gettir are running at a loss.
John Lewis and others charge a surcharge for small deliveries with free delivery to their shops. We had a failed round of Parcel delivery shops 10 years ago will they return?
Most delivery vehicles for anything above small parcel size are equipped with trolleys. But time is the problem. And in big cities, just as you say, there is almost nowhere for the truck to stop, and the half hour it might take to make the delivery just isn't there in the driver's day.
I don't think that was a delivery problem, you needed some workmen to be able to deliver and install a large appliance. There are some things that can't be done on foot/bike.

I used to live on Fairfield Road, Tower Hamlets in a no car development. What the council operated then was a 2 tier approach to their parking rules. Most residents in older houses/flats could apply for several parking permits and buy books of visitor parking permits for their friends to come and visit. They could also park anywhere in the borough for part of the day.
By contrast despite paying full council tax I was not even allowed to have a limited number of visitors permits for when workmen needed to carry out a job. This two tier approach is at the whim of Tower Hamlets to change.
Similar problem in Haringey, where online permits have replaced paper and residents are now restricted to a maximum of two vistors’ permits a day instead of being able to buy as many paper ones as required; not much use if more than one tradesperson is working on the same day or for anyone with multiple friends/family coming from a long way away. I suppose the idea is to push people to buy some kind of exemption permit at much higher cost as a way of increasing revenue. At least my side road generally has space, but the adjacent highly-restricted main road must be a nightmare for flat-dwellers living above the shops.
When I lived in Newham, I remember being shocked that the only issue that every. single. candidate. in the local elections mentioned in their campaign was parking.

You've identified the solution, there's a side road with residents parking. Public land for private property storage. Convert that into deliveries and the problem is solved.
We recently moved house from a yellow-lined street. We had quotes from several movers, and the Ts and Cs always said that they would charge us for any parking charges or fines. Fortunately our lines only operated for 1 hour per day (to deter commuters) and were rarely patrolled. We now live in a city where almost the entire centre is buses only most of the time - goodness knows how people cope with deliveries.
>>I'm increasingly uncertain what'd happen if I ever had to move out.

I don't know what happens in London. In Edinburgh (where I currently reside) if you need space for a removal van, you apply to Edinburgh Council and they suspend the parking restriction. I don't recall if there's a fee for this. (I suspect that there probably is one.)
Just in my road the presence of supermarket, parcels vans, cars and mopeds doing deliveries is noticeable, how residents in flats are supposed to cope isn't addressed, and as mentioned above there are those with medical needs, so carers, district nurses, doctors doing home visits, deliveries of medical supplies, transport for hospital appointments etc.
Hell is other people.

I live 20 minutes brisk walk from a commuter mainline station (not a terminus). The station has car parks but they are (a) expensive and (b) often full. Many commuters parked instead for free on the nearby roads, often residential. Eventually those roads were restricted to residents parking and short visitor permits. So commuters parked instead just outside the restricted zone. So the restricted zone was extended. And again. And again. And now my house is in the restricted zone, even though we've never had problems with commuters. Each time more residents are required to pay for the ability to continue to park on the road outside or near their house.

I used to leave nearer the centre of town. Without residents parking, I would never have found a space. I now live in the suburbs, with acres of space, but our parking is restricted too. It is a small thing, but salient.

Hell is other people.
I moved house in 2021 entirely by cargo bike with a large trailer, in two loads. Including furniture! It's amazing how much you can move with one bike these days. I recommend PedalMe - they charged about £80 including Tetris style loading and unloading by the rider. (Other cargo bike companies are no doubt available.) No doubt there will be someone along in the comments to say you can't use a cargo bike to move across the country. That's probably right, but for those of us moving bulky stuff across London it's an amazing solution to the problem you outline.
What a Payne.


Am surprised by the number of empathetic comments, given the usual rabid anti-vehicle tone of some commenters.
Have you tried contacting your local councillor? My partner lives in the flats next to McDonald's and Rachel Blake was hugely helpful when they had problems with their landlord, we were very impressed with how helpful she was
So that's what the stripes mean! Back in ex-colony HK (which inherited UK road markings), the double yellows mean no stopping/loading/parking full-stop, no pavement stripes. No exceptions there. Seems very odd to me that you're allowed to load on a single/double yellow.

The entire find a loading space in general seems like a nightmare here.
I live in a parking permit zone with the train station on same Road, delivery drivers often do a quick dash and drop
On-street parking has always been very difficult in my area, and someone once refused to come to my flat to measure for some furnishing unless I told them where they'd be guranteed a space. I turned them down.

But my area is now also about to become largely residents parking and whilst I will be entitled to visitor permits, newer blocks have a planning condition that says they can't. Plus, my area now can't be reached without going through a clean air zone, and I wonder if that will also start to put off people delivering or they will charge extra. And yet this is also at a time when retailers are encouraging people to shop online and get deliveries.
It’s possible to regret the use of petrol vehicles and even support LTNs in principle (not necessarily rabidly), but the comments here highlight the flip-side of the “two wheels good, four wheels bad” thinking so prevalent in London right now: vehicles are penalised, but necessary mitigation — such as improving public transport, ensuring bus stops aren’t marooned by cycle lanes, and providing proper parking places for deliveries and workpeople — is almost never put in place beforehand. It’s no wonder so many people get exercised by traffic reduction measures when councils seem to ignore the realities of daily life.










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