A new parking scheme has “divided the community”, causing chaos and fights according to a residents’ representative.
Ian Beck, from Hollingdean Residents’ Association, spoke out about the new south Hollingdean parking scheme before a Brighton and Hove City Council housing management panel meeting.
At the meeting last night (Tuesday 9 June), Mr Beck said that he had broken up fights between people over parking spaces and had never received as many complaints about any issue in the area over 10 years.
He said: “This parking scheme has turned the north of Hollingdean against the south of Hollingdean. This has created a north-south divide because the north hasn’t got a parking scheme. The south has.
“What’s actually happening now is people are stuck going further up Davey Drive, in Hollingdean, and they’re parking in the north area and there’s people parking on double yellow lines, in residents’ parking bays, blocking bus routes. This is causing absolute chaos.
“The residents of Hollingdean would like an open meeting about this because this scheme is not what we asked for in the first place. We asked for a light-touch scheme.
“People could park in Hollingdean but not people who were staying there for several days at a time.”
The scheme, labelled zone 14, has 750 parking spaces which Mr Beck said was not enough to serve the 19,000 residents in the area.
He asked if anyone involved with setting up the scheme would come and look at the problems it had caused.
A written response to concerns before the meeting from the parking scheme project manager Anthony Patchett said that details had been shared with Labour councillor Trevor Muten, the council’s cabinet member for transport and city infrastructure.
He said that the scheme was operating at 61 per cent capacity although this figure did not reflect the availability on every street.
Mr Patchett added: “We note the concerns raised regarding the availability of parking for residents, the difficulties experienced by visitors and reports of tension between neighbours.
“While residents’ permits allow parking across the whole zone, we appreciate this may not always feel convenient in practice.”
The housing management panel was told that the comments from the meeting would be shared with parking services who would be asked to visit the area.
All part of BHCC’s agenda to punish and inconvenience you if you own a car .
If you drive in Brighton, bhcc Transport dept hate you
Why not have ONE citywide street parking zone for ONE price? Easier for residents. Easier for Council. No resident is going to be parking where they don’t live or work for more than a few hours so abuses shouldn’t be an issue. It is wholly unfair to have tiered pricing according to how ‘high demand’ an area is. A situation often artificially created by the council deliberately taking out paid parking bays in that area. But this doesn’t stop them selling three times as many permits as there are spaces!
Because that would take sense, which is what every moron working for BHCC lacks
This situation is crazy. We were told that this parking scheme would not create a cash cow for the council. Thousands of residents are being forced to pay for parking in Hollingdean when they were not before
This scheme is a money making scheme for the council.
I have elderly residents and parents fighting for too few parking spaces.
Someone will be seriously hurt if this continues.
The joke is Residents still can’t park near their properties because most of the area is double yellow lines.
All the things that we stated as problems during consultation period are happening . We know our area BHCC do not and we were ignored.