If you want to see scenes of entitled parking causing chaos you should get up to Storey Arms in the Brecon Beacons on any remotely sunny day!
The road that goes past the walker’s entry to get onto Pen Y Fan is a trunk road with no parking allowed (controlled by the circular red cross sign over a blue background) along it between Merthyr and Brecon unless it’s in a car park or Layby, of which there are a few. A few years ago the road was redone with new kerbs, widened slightly plus a new entry to the official NT car park. This left a flat area each side that was just over a car’s width either side. The first day it was fully open was a Saturday and cars parked both sides of the road, creating chaos as they churned up the soft soil, parked at all sorts of odd angles and with people getting out of their cars directly onto a 60mph trunk road there were loads of near-misses with cars, lorries and the regular motorbikes. That Monday the highways agency, National Park Authority and the council got together and hastily had a local quarry drop hundreds of boulders along the side of the road as anti-parking measures. Didn’t stop anyone, they just drove onto the grass head-on between the boulders instead. The next weekend someone was hit by a truck going along as they crossed the road between two parked SUV’s, thankfully the lorry was going slowly but the dashcam footage from it was on the web showing how the driver had no chance of missing them.
The next weekend it was chaos again up there with people parked everywhere they shouldn’t so the council sent up a traffic warden who ticketed every car they could, some 150 vehicles. This caused an utter uproar so the National Trust and Rambler’s Association got involved saying every ticket should be cancelled as it was the fault of whoever was in charge of car parking for not creating enough parking for everyone. This backfired on two points: 1: the main car park up there is the responsibility of the National Trust and 2: there are plenty of layby’s all within a mile of the main car park but no-one uses them as they’re ‘too far away’!
Cutting out a year of arguments, it was after a lot of serious pressure from the Rambler’s Association that it was agreed that a temporary 30mph limit would be used every weekend so that traffic is slower and that parking on the sides would be temporarily ignored until a better car park can be built. This was o the agreement that the National Trust would commit to building a larger car park on the site of their current one after the felling that was taking place was finished. New plans were duly submitted and approved and the felling finished so all should have been moving on nicely. But no. The National Trust then refused to build the new car park siting that it would spoil the view and not be in keeping with the area!! 2 years on there is still the parking on the verges and the temporary 30mph limit. Even this hasn’t stopped 3 people being hit while crossing the road or getting out of their cars and earlier in the year it took most of a night to recover a lot of parked cars from the verge after heavy rain the night before meant everyone got stuck. The National Trust have been told this summer that the temporary speed restrictions will lapse this winter and that they have to start working on the car park else all illegal parking up there will be clamped down on and the speed restrictions will be removed. The Rambler’s Association are now trying to get a legal challenge to this as they now say they have a right to park and access the countryside.
All so a load of fat and lazy people can park as close as humanly possible to a 2m wide gravel path that goes directly to the summit of Pen Y Fan and claim to have walked up the highest mountain in the area but refuse to walk the extra 1/2 mile to the car parks and laybys further along the road. It’s utterly ridiculous.
Posted 3 years ago
Posted 3 years ago
