How to stop parking in Redlands getting worse...

Labour councillors are planning to go ahead with pay-and-display (which will make the council £100,000 per year) and residents’ parking but only around the hospital area (green on map above) and have dropped plans for residents’ parking to the east of Alexandra Road (red on map above). The next step is a formal consultation with residents – we will send out details of this when we have them – unfortunately this will be in May after the elections (register your interest by emailing me: rob@readinggreenparty.org.uk).

Campaigner Kizzi Murtagh thinks this approach to parking is a bad idea and urges people to respond to the consultation when it happens. We think pressure needs to be put on the hospital and university to be good neighbours, and the council needs to do more to promote walking, cycling and public transport.

We believe that solutions are needed to the parking problems in Old Redlands and close to the hospital. But we think these must be done sensitively, with the communities affected, not by drastically reducing the amount of parking (which the previous scheme did), and not by shifting problems from one road to the next (which this scheme will do).

We will be lobbying for the Council to properly consider residents’ parking bays on both sides of the road in the St Luke’s Church area (and beyond where appropriate). Cars would park a little on the pavement, as they do now, but a residents’ parking scheme would reduce the number of cars in the area and make it easier for people to park and get around.

The formal consultation will happen in the next few months, we will let you know when it starts and how you can respond as soon as we have the information. Please share this with your friends and family in the area and get them to email us back registering their interest (rob@readinggreenparty.org.uk) as the more people that respond to this consultation the better.

Traffic Committee report here: http://beta.reading.gov.uk/media/4458/item11/pdf/item11.pdf