Greens working hard on South Park Ward road safety and parking

We had a good street meeting on Green Road last night to talk about parking problems and to develop a scheme for the road.

A scheme in Green Road would be part of a larger South Park Ward permit parking area.

In preparation for the meeting I thought about what has happened in the run-up to the road safety and parking problems which I have copied and pasted below.

Let us know if you would like a street meeting for your road to work on tackling road safety and parking problems in the South of Park Ward. We will keep working with residents to improve the area: rob@readinggreenparty.org.uk

Timeline

3 years ago – Council starts actively working on a parking scheme for the Hospital and University area.

3 years ago – we suggest to Labour councillors that we work together on a bigger areawide scheme to prevent the parking knock-on which we have now. Labour said no.

2 years ago – we work with residents across a number of roads (Hamilton, Bulmershe, Crescent and more) collecting signatures on petitions asking for permit parking to prevent the parking knock-on problems from occurring. We also organised and attended public meetings on this issue. Following this the council transport planners support the idea of investigating an areawide scheme for the South of Park Ward.

This year – Redlands parking scheme goes live and as we predicted this causes problems at the edge of the scheme in roads such as Hamilton Road and Crescent Road.

This year – we have worked with residents, organising and attending meetings, to produce designs for how residents’ parking could work in some of the roads in the South of Park Ward.

This year – we have campaigned with the police, fire brigade, schools and residents for the South Park Ward scheme to be prioritised and for designs to be developed and consulted on.

This year – Labour double yellow line debacle on Hamilton Road has wasted a lot of councillor and officer time.

Recently – the council has agreed to consult on the idea of permit parking for the South Park ward area but not on a detailed design – slowing things down still further.

Unfortunately things are moving very slowly. Pavements continue to be blocked, parking is chaotic and road safety is bad. This is not good enough. We have already consulted residents and are ready to move to the design phase now.

We will continue to work with residents to get the Labour council to prioritise a road safety and permit parking scheme for the South of Park Ward, and get it in as soon as possible.