10 January - Parking. The good news and the no good at all
Yesterday
was a good day for
Operation Zero Tolerance. Two cars immediately outside my house were given
parking tickets and a third one 100 yards away as well.
The car pictured here represents a bit of a problem. It was left there by a woman, or to be more precise I saw a woman
standing next to it at 7 a.m. yesterday morning, while the car’s lights were still on. I assumed a short term stop to
give a friend a lift or some such thing but it is still there more than 24 hours later partially blocking my own drive
and preventing several people nearby from getting their vehicles out of their rear parking spaces.
SloppyStyle’s refuse trucks cannot get access to
their overflowing bins either. Incidentally, the bins shown in Photo 1 have
all been there unemptied since before Christmas.
Meanwhile the residents of New Road are being abused by Bexley Council which is
imposing
additional parking restrictions (and costs) on them in order to allow buses to run unimpeded.
Buses that arguably should be going up and down a re-engineered
Knee Hill. Residents everywhere come a poor second to ever more buses and Bexley
Council appears to be unable to understand that parking restrictions in one
place merely displace the problem to somewhere else. Especially when the somewhere else is closer to Abbey Wood station.
Because Bexley Council’s intentions are not very clear from the proposed Traffic
Order, one persistent resident took himself off to the Contact Centre as
directed by Michael Wenbourne, a name familiar to me because it was
attached to correspondence which said I did not have a dropped kerb to my house
even though it has been there since 1987. Photo 2.
Having made the journey he was told that the Contact Centre does not hold a copy
of the Order and associated map but they did offer to send one through the post.
The resident had taken the precaution of phoning 020 3045 3943 beforehand to warn them of his planned visit but
unfortunately no one answers the phone in Mr. Wenbourne’s department.