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Are parking rules different on a Sunday? I don't mind church goers going to church but the abandoning of cars is weird. We had one park in the end of our drive and they were parked on an area that is council owned but narrow so in effect blocking it. But that had to shuffle passed a half empty car park to commune with their diety.
I left school in 1981. There were absolutely no kids getting dropped off in cars.
What has changed, why can't they walk/cycle
anymore?
Edit,we have a friend who is a teacher and she's glad that due to covid ,mums can no longer take their kids into school and hang their coats up for them.
zippykona
Full MemberI left school in 1981. There were absolutely no kids getting dropped off in cars.
What has changed, why can’t they walk/cycle
anymore?
Posted 58 seconds ago
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Many families now have both parents working. You'll find a lot drop the kids at school then dash straight off to work.
It's too dangerous to walk to school with all the idiot drivers dropping their kids off at school.
I left school in 1981. There were absolutely no kids getting dropped off in cars.
I started high school about then. I was dropped off by a mate's dad for a while, but it was about 37 kids stuffed into the back of an Astra Max van.
Speaking of footpaths, I discovered today that people are getting quite militant about proposed advertising boards in Manchester.
After a bit of Googling.
"JCDecaux UK is expanding its national digital street furniture channel into a new major city..."
"In phase one, JCDecaux has begun installing 17 communication hubs..."
Digital street furniture channel? Communication hubs? Newspeak?
Try living in a tourist hotspot with house drive/parking overlooking the finest view.
We had multitude (like 10x a day) 'only going to be a few minutes' parked vehicles, from motorbikes to coaches.
The finest however was the day a Landrover/ off Road Owners Club day out saw two 110's parked in my back garden, on the lawn. They assumed it was thier pals, so drove 6 more vehicles in and set up a little ring of camp chairs.
They then argued with me that it wasn't thier fault that I didn't have a gate on our entrance...no apology, only grumpiness.
I am constantly amazed by how near to the school gate people insist on parking and causing a problem when there’s plenty of space a hundred metres away.
40 years of neoliberalism have turned large parts of our society into an incredibly selfish collection of individuals who will not consider anyone else.
Our offices are behind a posh estate agents, convenience store and handily a cycle shop. There is a driveway to access our yard next to the estate agents.
Quite regularly folks block the entrance, which is quite frustrating when loading and offloading. Especially if I've had to work a Saturday.
Before now I've blocked the driver in, so they bang on the office door demanding I move the van. So I make them wait, causing lots of anger and really busy, got to pick up/drop off kids etc.
There's a free carpark over the road.
The most angry tend to be the visitors to the estate agents with massive posh cars. A surprising number don't lock their cars, so I let off the handbrake and roll it into the road.
I don’t mind church goers going to church but the abandoning of cars is weird.
It's so bad near us at a Catholic church, the junction nearby is referred to in our house as "Our Lady of Perpetual Traffic Chaos"
I left school in 1981. There were absolutely no kids getting dropped off in cars.
Car use and the perceived danger has increased a hundred fold since then. I will take bets that a good 90% of parents don't want it to be like this, and would, if given half a chance, choose a different way. But schools are under pressure to maintain budgets and cycling or safe walking provision (something our parents and teachers didn't have to think about) are surprisingly expensive to maintain. It's easy for a head to swerve the whole thing by ignoring it and letting parents just carry on and it becomes it's own monster
no apology, only grumpiness.
People in cars are never wrong. Nobody anyone does with a car can ever be rationally argued against.
Eh, by ‘eck, I can remember walking to school, about half a mile or so, in the snow in the winter of 1963. Wearing shorts. I was the first lad at school to start wearing long trousers because it got so cold.
For those who can’t remember/didn’t know, it started snowing on Boxing Day, and the snow didn’t start to melt until March. I was eight at the time. I think there was only one family in the street who had a car, and they ran a taxi service.
As someone pointed out, a large part of the problem is working parents, probably working some distance from the home, needing to take the kids to school before work. Once kids get to a certain age, about nine/ten, they should be perfectly capable of getting to school on their own, either on a bike or walking, I see lots of the local kids walking, some of them walk about a mile or so, without needing to be driven.
In rural areas it’s not so easy, because many of the small schools that served villages closed years ago, so it’s necessary for parents to drive them to the nearest school, which might easily be five, six or more miles away, along narrow, dark and dangerous lanes with no footpath or lighting. Any child in Nettleton, which is out the other side of Castle Combe, would probably go to school in Yatton Keynall, and having walked part of that route, it’s bloody scary! Steep, with barely room for one car in places, and banks that drop straight down to the tarmac, not unlike South Devon. And public transport is a joke, don’t get me started on how inadequate that is!
Many families now have both parents working. You’ll find a lot drop the kids at school then dash straight off to work.
This doesn't explain though why they need to get to within 100m of the school gate. If they need to dash to work, why not drop them off 10 mins earlier and a short walk from school. Better for the kids, better for the congestion and gives them more time to get to work?
Don't ever suggest a school mum/dad should set off slightly earlier, rather than complaining they can't park right outside the school as it's in a 30's cul-de-sac where the resident's have to park on the street. Oh noo.. resident's are in the way. We ended up with police outside the school to stop the fights.
This stuff winds me up so much more than it should. It mind boggling the entitlement and thoughtlessness of so many people.
Theyve part pedestrianised the culdesac at the juniors entrance at school, with a bollard and everything, and parents just squeeze past it
"im just dropping my kids off"
OBVIOUSLY DICKHEAD, does the massive red No Entry sign not apply?
Ive seen one hurried abandonment on the zig zags that actually blocked the pedestrian gate!
Returned to their stupid car to a queue of people waiting to get around it.
The solution is easy. Cars are to Brits what Sacred cows are to Hindus. Nothing shall impede them, They are what Guns are to Americans, a God given right.
There should be a specific exemption passed into law that render Cars the objects they are...
“In phase one, JCDecaux has begun installing 17 communication hubs…”
folks in Brussels are sick of them so there is an anti-publicity game going on in November, various categories such as number switched off on one night, best alternative sign etc
https://zapgames.net/liberation-de-panneaux/
I kind of like this one:
and 😀 at theoatmeal cartoon
For those who can’t remember/didn’t know, it started snowing on Boxing Day, and the snow didn’t start to melt until March
That brings back memories. I was 13, just moved from London to Kent, A20 blocked by 10' drifts...
Two young children orphaned and the suggestion of a parking dispute 🙁
Where I live they've solved the problem by banning cars near schools during school hours. It works because everyone is within walking distance of their school
https://hackney.gov.uk/school-streets
franksinatra
This doesn’t explain though why they need to get to within 100m of the school gate. If they need to dash to work, why not drop them off 10 mins earlier and a short walk from school. Better for the kids, better for the congestion and gives them more time to get to work?
fossy
Don’t ever suggest a school mum/dad should set off slightly earlier
I can only speak for my own child's school but getting there early doesn't help with this.
You wait with your child until their class gets called in. If you park 10 mins away, obviously it adds 10 mins to the time you get into work.
I don't know why some people insist on parking on the same street as the school though, laziness probably, or a lack of parking available elsewhere.
Whatever happened to the consultation document on pavement parking that the DfT put out a while ago? I recall lots of comment about it but guess it's been held up by Covid. IIRC that was proposing to make pavement parking illegal, with a fixed penalty fine for transgressors. Obviously that's worked so well for mobile phone usage...
tu es Parisien et je réclame mes cinq euros
🙂
I can only speak for my own child’s school but getting there early doesn’t help at all.
You wait with your child until their class gets called in. If you park 10 mins away, obviously it adds 10 mins to the time you get into work.
Understood but this is surely only a thing for the youngest of kids, any older kids can walk to the playground themselves without parents.
left school in 1981. There were absolutely no kids getting dropped off in cars.
Yeah right! Plus, there was a resident peado on every street (don't go near No37!). So if one's school was say, a mile away, that means potentially getting nonced-up about ten times! And that's just on the way in! Plus having to dodge killer dogs and those glue-sniffing skinheads that threw your mate off a roof.
Well, no sign this afternoon, despite me still being f***ing sad and there still being no car on the drive. Maybe he was going to be more than 30 seconds. 🙂
The thought occurs, I've reported a few of the yellow line parkers through the council website in the past - never heard anything back (which is fair enough), but I realised this afternoon that there were definitely repeat offenders I no longer see offending. Snagged a couple more this afternoon, interested to see if reporting them stops it.
Yeah right! Plus, there was a resident peado on every street (don’t go near No37!). So if one’s school was say, a mile away, that means potentially getting nonced-up about ten times! And that’s just on the way in! Plus having to dodge killer dogs and those glue-sniffing skinheads that threw your mate off a roof.
Every street had at least one dog lazing about the pavement, and every so often you'd get packs of dogs chasing cars down streets. Every few streets had an aggressive (meaning noisy) dog to avoid.
A school friend used to get beaten up regularly for being really tall. And obnoxious.
Another school friend got stabbed in the belly after school when he was a teenager. No reason for it, but he'd occasionally show the scar.
And, not a schooldays story just a nod to weird times, a work colleague once told me about being beaten up, early 80s, by a bunch of teddy boys because he was wearing his motorbike leathers.
The thing about this I don't get, is that I live in a well-to-do place, where quite a lot of people are concerned about keeping up appearances. Yet it seems like all the social etiquette goes out of the window when cars are concerned.
You've gotta mind your Ps and Qs in the Co-op lest you be overheard discourteous, But you can park dangerously around school, posing a threat to children and pissing off neighbours -and no one seems to care.
<Walter Sobjek>"Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one who cares about the rules?"</TBL>
Daughter gets a bus to school, but there's no bus home. 2 days week she walks the 2.5 miles home with a friend, as the route includes a stretch of muddy unlit footpath where kids seem to get followed, harassed and occasionally attacked maybe once or twice a year.
The days she can't walk home with a friend, one of us has to fetch her. We park 400 yards away from the carnage of parent parking to avoid any unseemly fist fights with fellow parents.
After today's terrible news about possible parking dispute leading to two people being murdered, be careful. Some crazy folk out there.
Not just schools, my mate owns this @51.0820788,-4.0583011,3a,75y,125.61h,83.45t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1smp3Utj5mSWnxp8hgQt75uQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3Dmp3Utj5mSWnxp8hgQt75uQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D266.796%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192!5m1!1e1">Garage
All was going well until the pizza place moved in next door.
Barely a day goes by without his entrance being blocked, he's had to put up extra signage, yellow crosshatching, phone calls to the police/council/Dominos
On Two for one pizza day the whole road is an utter no go between 5 & 7pm, pavements blocked both sides between the road junctions.
Yet drive 50 yards on & turn left - dozens of empty parking spaces.
A few years ago I had a colleague who lived opposite a school and every morning there was a FAM (Fat angry man) who parked either on his driver or over his drive blocking him in. Complaints to the FAM lead to abuse and threats to do his windows in.
Well one morning FAM found a car parked on the dropped kerb outside his own house blocking his car in completely. He called the police who told him to report it to the council, he called the council who sent out a parking warden who put a ticket on the car.
The next day the car was still there. And the following day, and the day after. The car didn't move for ten days and a new parking ticket was put on the car every day. FAM tried to move the car but the wheels seemed seized and the police told me if he damaged the car he would be guilty of criminal damage. The FAM sat watching the car everyday getting angrier and angrier getting ready to confront the person who had abandoned the car outside his house.
Then FAM got a letter from the DVLA. The letter was a new V5 for the car that was parked outside his house. Turns out he was the legal owner from about a fortnight earlier and he was liable for all the parking tickets.
Turns out "someone" had bought the car in his name (a complete banger worth about £10) and parked it outside his house.
Apparently FAM was very, very, very angry.
🙂
"Modern life in the UK is stressful. We’re under pressure to get to work and get our kids to school etc and there’s no provision for doing this sensibly, "
it really does not have to be like that - the stress and the difficulty is because of the choices you make.
"Car use and the perceived danger has increased a hundred fold since then."
Nonsense about car use. maybe percieved danger but real danger is less
the main reason for the car droppoff is the weird tory "choice" agenda for schools meaning for many its out of walking distance. We all used to go to the local school which was in walking distance
Then FAM got a letter from the DVLA. The letter was a new V5 for the car that was parked outside his house. Turns out he was the legal owner from about a fortnight earlier and he was liable for all the parking tickets.
That... That is one of the best stories I've ever heard. 😀
The FAM story is great. Please let it be true, not urban myth.
it really does not have to be like that – the stress and the difficulty is because of the choices you make.
Well yes, you can choose to not have kids so you don't both have to work to support them and simultaneously avoid the school parking issue.
The way society has developed in the 35 years since I were a lad has led people to have to make, frankly, rubbish choices, and society is going to need probably the same amount of time to sort it's shit out unless there's some seriously sensible government action, which even then would take 10 years at least - suitable affordable housing, public transport and cycling infrastructure, massive internet investment to enable more flexible working from home, realistic living wage etc.
Understood but this is surely only a thing for the youngest of kids, any older kids can walk to the playground themselves without parents.
The playground gates are locked until it's nearly time to go in at my kids' school, so they'd be hanging around on the pavement.
Where do you suppose they hang around when not in school?
The FAM story is great. Please let it be true, not urban myth.
It's absolutely true. It's possible I was involved in the purchase of said Vauxhall Cavalier. I may also know how it was delivered and the gearbox was jammed in first gear. I might, if pushed also have a recollection of how the bolts got into the rear hubs that meant they couldn't be moved either. I also vaguely recall that the suspension somehow collapsed so you couldn't get a tow truck dolly under it necessitating a rather expensive machine being required to lift and move it, a process not helped by the unfortunate incident which resulted in the boot and engine bay being filled with concrete.
I suspect that FAM got quite a large bill to have it removed and disposed of.
I miss the days when you could go to a main dealer and get a trade in with a months tax and MOT on it for a tenner because it would cost them £50 to get the scrapy to take it away.
But if anyone knows Mr FAM who lived in Sittingbourne about 20 years ago, then I know nothing...
😂
The playground gates are locked until it’s nearly time to go in at my kids’ school
So the safe play and learning space paid for by taxpayers, for the benefit of children, actively excludes them?
Wow.
I'm happy to discuss this with the HT and governors.
(Says director of national school grounds charity).
Where do you suppose they hang around when not in school?
There is a rather good argument that the safe, taxpayer funded, for the benefit of children space, can offer even better value and safety for children to play out of hours....
boris - that's an absolute belter!
I am actively opposed to the school run - we were lucky enough to live within walking distance of the primary, but now the boy has started at secondary it’s a gnat’s whisker under 3 miles, up and down some very steep hills. We try for him to use the bus but bus provision round here is a joke - regular cancellations of services with no notice (and I mean services! Not just individual buses), daily no shows for the buses that are still running. There used to be a relatively direct bus when we were planning his trip to school, but it was withdrawn before term started.
We have written to the councillors, who are in complete agreement with us that bus provision is unacceptable - the bus company, who ignore us; the regional mayor who deals with integrated transport policy, and everyone else - to absolutely no avail.
Our city is implementing clean air zones and suffers from dreadful traffic problems. Sensible public transport seems a no brainer but appears to be unachievable.
So he uses the bus when he can but if it doesn’t turn up by the time it should have come there’s no option to wait for the next as he’ll be late (and censured by the school even if it’s not his fault) so we have to drive him across town. We don’t go door to door but up it’s a complete waste but because of the hopeless bus provision unavoidable.
We can’t do cycling for a couple of reasons - the school is at a very steep hill (we’re on the opposite hill the other side of town) bounded by two fast main roads - traffic in the centre of town can be hellish and dangerous - and he’s a very nervous and unconfidnent rider on the road.
So the safe play and learning space paid for by taxpayers, for the benefit of children, actively excludes them?
Yes, unless you pay for breakfast club.
He's parked on a drive over the road today - and he's been much more than 30 seconds! 🙂 Since that also puts the nose of his car across the pavement, I'll start reporting it and see what happens.