Voucher mayhem

Mayhem

The figleaf solution of vouchers is now slowly coming into being after the meters have been turned off and/or removed. Stand in any high street or car park and watch the arm waving and exasperation of motorists who don't have the technical means to pay ( otherwise known as a mobile telephone ). I do not think that many motorists are going to adjust, I think they are going to go elsewhere.

I walked across the Stapylton Road car park on Saturday, just 2 weeks before Christmas, at 3pm. There were 21 empty spaces which is a third of the car park. This pattern is being repeated across the entire borough. Shoppers are voting with their wheels.

Now if vouchers are to be an alternative they need to be easily available and at prices of £1, £2, £3, £5 and £7 which are the possible prices in High Barnet.

Can you buy all of these in a local shop? No, only by email ( the people who don't have a mobile telephone might just be the same people who don't have a computer - aargh ). That seems a bit ridiculous to me. If the council was committed to vouchers it would make them widely available and in all denominations.

I saw the wraparound in the local paper which said vouchers at £1 and £2 were available but when I tried to buy them I couldn't. I was too quick to try it seems.

This is what the Parking Process Team have now written:

Parking vouchers can only be requested via e-mail

We require the your full name, full postal address, the number of vouchers you require and contact telephone number. We will then process your request in the back office and our payment team will contact you ( will it be this year? ) to take payment over the phone via credit/debit card (we will not be able to process cheques and postal orders for orders placed via e-mail.)

Please note that presently the Parking Vouchers are sold as single vouchers, each voucher costs £2.00 and allows motorists to park in a ‘Pay by Phone Bay’ and a ‘Shared Use Bay’ only, for a 1 hour period. They are not valid in Residents’ Bays, Doctors Bays, Disabled Bays or Suspended Bays, or any bay that is reserved for a specific class of vehicle.

Only the 1 hour vouchers at a charge of £2.00 each can be purchased at the moment.

Kindly send your request to parkingvouchers@barnet.gov.uk

Yours appealingly

Miss Feezance

Cashless & clueless ( Barnet Council are per the Barnet Labour Group )

Here is a press release of today

News from Labour

London Borough of Barnet Labour Group

We’re on your side

For immediate release

Monday 28 November 2011

Parking PayPoints show Barnet is
“cashless and clueless”

Parking PayPoints are too few and far away from parking areas in town centres according to Labour councillors.

The Council allows a 3 minute grace period between parking and displaying a parking voucher, but a recently released list of PayPoint locations across the Borough shows that many PayPoints are too far away for residents and visitors to find parking, pay for parking and display their parking voucher within the 3 minute time allowed.

A small sample of PayPoints shows that:

• In Totteridge, the Whetstone PayPoint is no longer available, and the nearest 3 PayPoints are much further away – North Finchley PayPoints are 0.83 miles away, Mays Lane and Wood Street PayPoints are over a mile away
• In East Finchley, there is only one PayPoint at the Long Lane Supermarket which is ¼ of a mile away from the nearest parking bays on the High Road.
• In Burnt Oak, there is only one PayPoint in Watling Avenue which is towards Burnt Oak Broadway and is at least a five minute walk away from the parking bays near the Library and the car park.
• In West Hendon, the CostCutter PayPoint in West Hendon Broadway is closed, and the nearest 2 PayPoints are at the BP Petrol Station which is 0.14 miles away, and the Metro Local which is 0.61 miles away from Perryfield car park.

Labour councillors also believe that the sign-posting to PayPoints in many cases is poor, and that the cost of the new proposed scratch cards, at £2 each with a minimum purchase of 4, is far too expensive for many local residents who just want to pop to the shops on a short trip. The cost of parking has been the subject of vociferous complaint by local residents and traders alike, who believe that high streets and town centres have already become deserted as a result of cash-less parking.

Labour councillors would like to see a more flexible and cheaper scratch-card system, and they support a two week Christmas amnesty on parking in Barnet’s Town Centres.

Labour’s Environment Spokesperson, Cllr Kath McGuirk, said:

"The PayPoint fiasco shows that under the Tories, parking policy in Barnet is not just cashless, it is completely clueless. In the run-up to Christmas Barnet should be supporting its traders and town centres - what we need is more flexible cash payment options, including cheaper scratch cards, and a two-week parking amnesty."

---

Less a question of PayPoint rather one of NoPoint trying to pay for your parking this way.

As a local resident said at a meeting of the Chipping Barnet Residents Forum last week it is

a FigLeaf, a Nonsense, Shameful and a Disgrace

I agree. Barnet Council have really not thought about the practical issues very well. They need to start again with the needs of, for example, the deaf, technophobes, the old, and the able-bodied all given equal weight and devise a system which brings together a number of different ways of paying which serves all drivers. The council make millions out of parking charges - you would think that the sensible thing to do would be to make paying them painless.

Yours appealingly

Ms Feezance

Crossover / dropped kerb parking - help needed

Here is a picture of a car, the black one, which was given a parking ticket for obstructing a crossover ( lowered kerb ). This car is outside the CPZ but just so you know the whole of Barnet is what is called a Special Enforcement Area and so you should never park across a dropped kerb ( except outside a CPZ and with the permission of the householder ).

It is clear that the car is not obstructing the crossover as a crossover is defined as starting where the level of the footway is lowered to meet the level of the road. That means that if your car ends alongside the sloping stone which takes the path down to meet the road then no contravention has occurred.

What I want like to have, to help my friend with his appeal, is photographs of cars which were similarly parked and where the PCN ticket ( Penalty Charge Notice ) was cancelled upon appeal. I would also need to have the PCN reference number if you are happy for your case to be used in support of my friend.

Even better if you have taken your case all the way to Patas as that will have set out the guidelines.

I do hope that you can help.

Yours appealingly

Miss Feezance

St Marys Primary - Dollis Park - Soak the parents

The below article appeared in the excellent Hendon & Finchley Times. See the original here.

PARENTS are rallying together to oppose Barnet Council’s plans for an all day parking restriction near a school in Finchley.

The current controlled parking in Dollis Park is from 2pm-3pm, but the council proposes to extend the restrictions from Hendon Lane up to Clifton Avenue, Church Crescent and Victoria Avenue from 8.30am-6pm.

Mums and dads who have children at St Mary’s CE Primary School in Dollis Park argue it will increase congestion near the school.

Claire Sparksman, whose seven-year-old daughter Angelina attends St Mary’s, said: “Introducing these restrictions in this quiet area will put increased pressure on parking further down Dollis Park and surrounding area and so increase congestion around St Mary's at the start and end of the school day.

“The area in which the revision is proposed is a quiet residential area with large houses, wide streets, away from shops and transport, with no clear need for all day parking.”

Ms Sparksman has written to the council opposing the changes which she argues will detriment the school’s Sustainable Travel Plan.

The travel plan encourages children to walk or cycle to school safely and has recently received an award at outstanding level by Transport for London.

Ms Sparksman added: “This proposal is clearly part of a borough-wide revenue raising strategy by Barnet Council which to introduce a stealth parking tax on local residents, costing us yet more money and more inconvenience.

If the plan goes ahead, many residents will pave over their gardens, remove trees and gardens and create their own off-street parking, resulting in a loss of green space in the area.”

I completely agree with Ms Sparksman. This is a venile attempt to extract more money from motorists. Now let us see how this might work. There won't be any parking meters that people can use as they are now, despite 53 years of valuable service in England, no longer acceptable in Barnet. 

So if you don't have a mobile phone what do you do? Well you find a space in the nearest bay to the school, which is 25m from the school gates. Then you take your 9 year old and walk back down Dollis Park, all the way up to Ballards Lane and then you turn right and go to the nearest Paypoint outlet which is at 2 Hendon Lane ( The Corner Supermarket ). To find your own nearest paypoint for any postcode go here.

You will then have walked 0.29miles = 466m and back again = 932m or almost a kilometre. This will have taken 15 minutes, maybe longer if there is a queue in the shop and your 9 year old will be tired at the start of the school day. And then you have to do the same again in the afternoon.

Whilst you are doing that the Civil Enforcement Officer who has been lurking nearby, ( remember that Barnet Council have been targeting schools according to a press release they sent out a month or two ago ) will have pounced and given you a ticket and then you will have to spend all your time writing to Barnet Council with an appeal, they take weeks to reply, or spend hours on the phone trying to get through to them, instead of helping your child with their homework.

I wonder how this cashless parking scheme ever got through the Equalities assessment. It must have been fudged.

If I was in charge of the school I think I would be looking to see how I could safely organise a dropping off point in the school entrance. From looking on google earth I can see that there is masses of tarmac. Send pedestrians and walkers right and cars left maybe ?

There must be a better way.

Yours appealingly

Miss Feezance

Cancel that CPZ - Church End - part

I cannot find any legislation that allows for the removal of a CPZ. It looks therefore like it is down to your local councillors to assist you. Here is an example of one small part of the Church End CPZ which is mooted for removal.

click to enlarge; back to return

So it seems that if the CPZ is close to local amenities which are regularly utilised by visitors to local amenities then it is OK to remove the CPZ. So Barnet High has shops in the High St, the library just behind, a museum (just), churches, Hadley Common, High Barnet tube, the Vale Drive clinic, Barnet College, all local amenities that get used by visitors. Best take out the C zone CPZ completely.

Seriously, if you want to get rid of your CPZ so that you don't have to pay £100 for your car, £4 a day for any visitors and risk getting a PCN at £110 if you oversleep then you need a plan. The route I would take is to go and talk to as many of the neighbours as possible and see if you can get a consensus, then put out a survey to every house in the zone and then discuss the findings with your ward councillors and convince them to support you. If you can make friends with Cllr Coleman so much the better.  Then make a formal application to the Council who will have to consult and then make a decision; hopefully in your favour if you have done the groundwork.

Best of luck

Miss Feezance

Keep calm and carry on

I believe in road safety and driver education. Here is an example of what can be done by some simple changes to the environment.

The following article appeared in the magazine Tree News which is published by The Tree Council

article is bottom left; click to enlarge, back to return

It is a bit harder to do this in town but perhaps Barnet could have a few boulevards lined by poplar trees like on the entry to towns in France.

Barnet was Barnét for a while after all.

Yours appealingly 

Miss Feezance

Moss Hall - have they borrowed some zig-zags from another school

I was out and about and my route took me past this school which a friend had told me had dodgy lines. It does.


click to enlarge, back to return

Lines that go on for ever. The first set appear to be longer than allowed for in the regulations. They also exist at an entrance that is not in use so a bit of a waste to blot out that section of road. There are four consecutive sets of zig-zags each separated by a 100mmm gap. It is envisaged that there could be two adjacent zig-zags in the government guidance but not four. This section of road needs to be visited again in order to repaint some of it with double yellow, single yellow or no lines at all and this would then give those parents that have to drive a fair chance of dropping their children somewhere near the school, give the coaches somewhere to stop and with 45 to 90m of unobstructed vision still keep the children safe.

Why such long hours? Why not just restrict the hours when children arrive for school and leave?

Just look at how lazy the contractor was, that or he was only paid to paint up to the end of the new tarmac, but the effect is that the second set of lines are invalid as incorrectly painted. There also used to be a white line which has no meaning.

I checked the national curriculum and found that Road safety is fortunately not included for junior schools. Message to coach drivers - ignore what the school suggest. If you switch off you engine whilst you are adjacent to one of these signs which are adjacent to zig-zags you will be committing the offence of stopping on a zig-zag which is not allowed, not even for the school bus, but as professional drivers you will know this. If you don't believe this then see this link.





reminds me of prison garb





These are the lines in Nether St. They are longer than 45m so if you have/had a ticket for parking on those appeal and/or ask for your money back as you have paid in error.