Residents in some of the streets in West Ealing have launched an online petition asking for the Council to carry out a consultation about parking in one of the last non-CPZ enclaves left in West Ealing – the streets bordered by Northfield Ave in the east, Leighton Road to the south, Grosvenor Road in the west and the Uxbridge Rd/Broadway to the north. The online petition states:
‘Due to tube/train commuters and holidaymakers parking their vehicles in our roads parking capacity is severely restricted for residents, home workers, ‘school runners’, visitors and shoppers in the West Walpole area in West Ealing. With the freshly painted double yellow lines in Sherwood Close together with Crossrail coming and the estate regeneration this parking pressure will only increase. (Area to include north from Leighton Road, west of Northfield Ave, east of Grosvenor Road, south of The Broadway in West Ealing – inclusive of those roads) Closing date is Wednesday, 1st June 2016 so that it can be submitted in time and presented at Full Council on Tuesday, 7th June.’
This parking problem in these narrow streets has been building up for a while. As other nearby areas have had CPZs introduced more and more cars have been trying to park in an ever decreasing area and it’s now reached breaking point. I noticed the yellow lines in Sherwood Close yesterday and knew it would have a serious impact as the number of cars parked there and down Bowmans Close has increased dramatically in the last 12 months. These yellow lines have slashed the available parking space here considerably. What is more, I imagine parking problems will only get even worse once the redevelopment of the Sherwood Close Estate gets underway later this year.
I live in one of the streets in this area and there are a couple of points worth thinking through as part of any consultation. Firstly, is the parking problem just during office hours? Where I live it’s been difficult for many years to park near my house during office hours. I’ve got used to that. What has changed though is that it’s now almost as diffcult to park near my house in the evening and a CPZ will not change this at all. The evening problem is simply the increase in the local population with more multi-occupied houses and houses being divided in to flats. There are quite simply a lot more people living in these streets than 10 years ago and quite a few of these people own cars. I don’t see any answer to this.
Secondly, quite a few people who work in West Ealing park in these streets. No doubt some could come to work on public transport rather than by car but can they all? It’s important to think through the full implications of introducing a CPZ in these streets and how it will affect the livelihoods of people working here and the shops and businesses they work for. I can see a CPZ with restrictions from, say 9-10am and 3-4pm, might not have that much of an impact on local people who drive to shop in West Ealing but it’s important to take in to account the impact on our high street.
The online petition can be found here
David Highton
I had a car for five years until five years ago. Parking was always tight but I dare not get another car now for fear of having nowhere to park it. With family visiting soon, I hope there will be space for a hire car every now and then. Given how so many gardens in Eccleston Road (and other areas) have been lost to parking, I do hope the CPZ policy is to refuse permits to people who already have off-street parking (but not to encourage them to put it in), particularly as providing access to their properties takes away parking on the street. Past policies of not allowing new-build flats to have parking will have contributed to crowded street parking in some areas, but it is definitely the increase in density of population which has brought more cars to the streets. I also believe, and said at the time, that the Singapore Road multi-storey car park should have been retained, refurbished and managed properly to provide secure parking, for example, to those who may not drive every day but who still need a car for occasional use – say, for evenings and weekends. If new CPZ zones are introduced, I hope that the number of permits issued is commensurate to the number of spaces available, which may mean limiting each household to one permit. It’s no use stopping from outsiders parking in zones if there are more cars than spaces from within the zone.