DRARA CPZ Concerns
In This Section
Divinity Road Area Residents’ Association: CPZ concerns
Open letter dated 6th May 2009 to Councillor Ian Hudspeth, Oxfordshire County Council
Context
To remind you of the context, Jacobs has recommended taking part of the pavement and using it for parking cars. The proposal is for pavements on one side of the road to have their width reduced from the existing 1.4 or 1.5 metres down to 1.1 or 1.2 metres, or 1.0 metre where there is an obstacle such as a lamppost. DRARA (Divinity Road Area Residents’ Association: http://drara.org.uk/) thinks that this will cause unacceptable problems for too many people.
You do not wish to insist on one permit per house as this would drive away families whose lifestyles currently depend on two cars. By the same token, you mustn’t allow a two-permit solution to drive away families with disabled members or friends, or indeed the other particular users who would be unable to use narrow pavements.
In some quieter streets with a CPZ, for example, Marston Street or Ferry Road, residents walk in the street because the pavements are too narrow now that cars can park on them. For many of them this “works” because the roads are almost cul-de-sacs, but the roads and the pavements in the DRA are busy, as you are aware, especially at school and university commuting times.
The CPZ plans assume that parkers would stay within the white lines, but as the photos I showed you demonstrate, all too often they do not (regardless of the threat of penalties). We would therefore like you to ask Jacobs to look again at some solutions that might mitigate these problems when the CPZ is in place.
Executive summary
1) I don’t know if your officers or Jacobs’ staff have tried any of the maneouvres that I’ve described in more detail below (“PROBLEMS”), many of which you have yourself witnessed, but I suspect that they haven’t. Can you urge them to actually experiment, as you and I did, with what they are proposing so they can see for themselves what some of the problems are going to be?
2) It is your prerogative to give officers or Jacobs the go-ahead to reduce the widths of either the carriageway or parking bays. Can you therefore ask them to reduce some of with the widths that they have worked to, so that pavement parking is unnecessary? Or at least so that it only encroaches by 15cm in places where officers feel it must, not by 30cm? For example:
• Please can you ask Jacobs to reduce the 30cm pavement encroachment in the CPZ? The minimum they have allowed for footway parking is 0.3m (12 inches). This leaves too little pavement. Plus, the few cars in this area that park with a wheel on the pavement require a maximum of 15cm (we have measured it). Perhaps Jacobs can actually try parking on the pavement with the low kerbs we have here – it is easy to get a wheel on.
• Can we have a narrower running width, please? The running width (carriageway) stands at 3.1 metres. This is much wider than the existing running width in most of Southfield Road, and is surely excessive when one considers that the width (including mirrors) of the next generation of Iveco front line ambulances is 2.5m. This is wider than current ambulances, fire engines, refuse trucks and delivery vehicles. Emergency vehicles will tend to use Divinity Road more than Southfield Road, and we hope that the Divinity Road chicanes will actually slow traffic. Further, the running width in Cross Street, which had its CPZ put in recently, is only 2.85m, and Southmoor Road in Jericho (also a CPZ) is a tiny bit narrower still. It can be done – it has been done. Please reduce the widths for this area too.
• Parking bay widths are generously wide. Can this be reduced if only by 5–10cm on each side of the road? Any pavement that can be saved really is needed. It is up to you to authorise Jacobs to reduce the bay widths.
• Can officers re-read http://www.dft.gov.uk/transportforyou/access/peti/inclusivemobility?page=2#a1001?
3) We have heard that it is possible to zone an entire street or neighbourhood as a “CPZ” without marking bays at the sides of the road. Is this true and if so, would you consider using this system in the DRA? This would allow narrower running widths and not require pavement parking. There is currently little pavement parking in this area and frankly little need for a CPZ, although we accept that with adjoining areas crying out for a CPZ we would be swamped by their overflow if we didn’t have one. Basically “it ain’t broke” but if you must fix it, can you do so without using the pavements?
PROBLEMS WITH ASPECTS OF THE DIVINITY ROAD AREA CPZ PROPOSALS
Passage of wheelchairs
You and I measured out 1.1 metres on the pavement and tried walking through the gap with a conventional wheelchair. It was tight but possible. An octogenarian neighbour, whose wife is wheelchair-bound, described pushing the wheelchair through the gap as “awkward” and said he wouldn’t want to do it frequently. Bear in mind that a 1 metre pavement past the many lampposts (etc.) would be even tighter – impassibly tight.
Bear in mind also that not all wheelchairs are pushed from behind. A resident in Sinnet Court has what she describes as a “sports” wheelchair. She has to be helped up Southfield Road by a friend because it is too steep for her to power herself. Although her “sports” wheelchair is narrower than a conventional one, it requires an assistant to walk and push next to the wheelchair rather than from behind. She pointed out that any narrowing of the existing parking arrangements would make it impossible for anyone to push her up the street. Although the full pavement width would be retained on the opposite pavement, she would be physically unable to live in a house on the side of the road with narrower pavement, and access to friends’ houses would be similarly impossible. Although few people are in her position, it is alarming that a car parking scheme would introduce such barriers to a disabled person.
Access problems with wheelchairs
You tried pushing the wheelchair out of my front gate with me in it. You found that that was impossible to push the wheelchair out of the gate because there wasn’t sufficient pavement width in which to turn the chair. An octogenarian would find this even harder.
You said that Jacobs would make sure that accesses would be left wider outside the houses of disabled people, but when we thought about it we realised that it would be perverse to implement a parking system that would effectively exclude residents or visitors who use wheelchairs, or who in the future become wheelchair users. No one can say if they will have to use a wheelchair in future. It would be a nonsense to install a road layout that effectively prohibits residents or their visitors from needing to use a wheelchair in future.
Access problems over the chicanes
It is proposed to alternate the sides of the road which have reduced-width pavements, with crossing being effected where there are chicanes. This sounds sensible but on local examination, it won’t work. The chicanes have a 10 cm gutter which a wheelchair would be unable to cross. Presumably the gutter cannot be removed as it is the main rainwater conduit – and when it rains heavily these gutters get very full.
Residents would also be reluctant to lose the trees that are planted in the chicanes as they provide much-needed street greenery.
Even if access over the chicanes is somehow resolved, it would in the opinion of wheelchair users who we have consulted be dangerous to bump down into the road directly into the carriageway without being able to see or be seen over parked cars, even if drivers do stick to 20mph.
It would be a nuisance for everybody – pedestrians as well as those in wheelchairs or with prams – to cross the road on several occasions just to get to the end of the road.
Passage and access problems: prams
As you and I observed and heard, access along the roads is hard enough as it is with a normal pram/buggy. With reduced pavements widths, pram handles (or parents’ hands) would hit the mirrors of parked cars, toddlers would hit their heads on mirrors. Dangled shopping would brush along cars.
Access by people with double-width prams (for twins)
They would be completely unable to use any pavements with car parking, which would be a problem especially if their house was on a stretch where cars parked on the pavement.
Passage and access problems: bicycles
A lot of people push bikes up Southfield Rd because it is steep. Pushing a bike along Southfield Rd with narrower pavements would be very hard. Pedals would damage cars. No one would be able to pass someone coming in the opposite direction if they were pushing a bike – nor, for that matter, would pedestrians be able to pass a pram or a wheelchair.
It is possible (but tight) to get a bike out of a side gate into a 1.1–1.2 metre pavement. People with tandems, tag-alongs and bike trailers for kids would not be able to leave their side gate unless they were able to lift the contraptions over side walls or over the cars parked opposite the side path. This is not a viable option.
Passage and access problems: wheelbarrows
A lot of residents have allotments nearby and push wheelbarrows along the pavements to get there. We haven’t experimented with getting wheelbarrows in and out of gateways which have a car parked 1.1m in front of it. Can we leave Jacobs to experiment with this one?
Regularisation of existing parking?
Your officers have stated that the CPZ seeks to improve the above problems by regularising existing parking habits. While this may be true in the Hurst St area, it certainly isn’t here. Few cars park on the pavement. Those that do, do so with only the width of a single tyre (15cm max). Drivers also push in their wing mirrors. It is important to remember that these protrude by 10cm in many cases, and passing them will be a problem. I doubt you could legislate that mirrors have to be pushed in, could you? With some cars this isn’t possible.
Real parking demand?
We are aware the New Marston RA, which covers William Street and Ferry Road, has asked Jacobs to exclude the white access-protection lines from the overall capacity of parking space in their CPZ in order to get a realistic number of available parking spaces for those with a valid permit. Could you ask officers do the same with our CPZ? Despite assurances to the contrary, there remains considerable concern that way too many white access-protection lines have been included in the theoretical reckoning of available spaces.
20 mph
To change the tune a little, may I say we are all very pleased indeed to hear that all of the streets in this area are to become 20 mph. We hope that the new CPZ designs will complement this scheme, but fear that the slightly wider running widths will have the opposite of effect and actually speed traffic up. What are your thoughts on this?
James Styring and Lynne Trenery,
on behalf of DRARA’s Traffic Action Group
6 May 2009
