Our family regularly cycled up the Gt Cambridge Road (A10) one in the early 1950s, starting from Highbury and finishing up on Broxbourne Common, which is now a housing estate. Father on tandem, me as "stoker", younger brother in a kiddy seat, mother on her solo, both Macleans bikes with 3-speed Sturmey Archers. My father fitted wooden blocks to the pedals so I could reach them.
So not forgotten!
i have used the ones alongside the a24 on many occasions . one of them has been improved in recent years :)
(https://smcse.city.ac.uk/staff/jwo/acf/emptyRoad1.jpg) | (https://smcse.city.ac.uk/staff/jwo/acf/emptyRoad2.jpg) |
(https://smcse.city.ac.uk/staff/jwo/acf/pavementParking1.jpg) | (https://smcse.city.ac.uk/staff/jwo/acf/pavementParking2.jpg) |
Unlike Africa and Asia, European streets are for the most part well-policed. Although some cities have parking requirements, these are seldom as extravagant as American ones, and have been progressively weakened. Several cities even have parking maximums, which restrict the amount of spaces. Huge buildings rise with hardly any provision for cars: the Shard in London has 95 storeys but just 48 spaces. Yet European cities are much kinder to cars than they usually admit.
To ride in one of Amsterdam’s “scan cars” is to witness the epitome of Western parking enforcement. As it moves through the streets, clicking noises confirm that roof-mounted cameras are snapping the number plates of every parked car. If any vehicle has overstayed—which the system knows because Amsterdam’s parking meters are connected to a database, and drivers are required to enter their number plates when they pay—a second officer is alerted. He rides to the scene on a moped and issues a digital fine. Amsterdam’s parking officers describe their system as fair. They mean it is so ruthlessly efficient that it cannot be beaten.
Just the ticket
Amsterdam charges up to €5 ($5.30) an hour for parking on the street. Visitors can also park underneath office buildings or in large, clean park-and-ride garages run by the city. Drivers thus have many choices and the city raises a lot of money—€190m in 2015. Yet this diverse, market-based system covers only a small slice of parking in Amsterdam. Three-quarters of spaces on the streets of the city centre are occupied not by visitors or commuters but by residents. And the people of Amsterdam, who are so keen on pricing parking for others, would not dream of exposing themselves to market forces.
Anybody who lives in a home without a dedicated space is entitled to buy a permit to park nearby for between €30 and €535 a year. This is a good deal and, not surprisingly, the number of takers in many districts exceeds the number of spaces. So Amsterdam has waiting lists for permits. The longest, in the Westerpark area, is 232 months long. To free more spaces, the city has begun to reimburse permit-holders part of the annual fee if they keep their cars in suburban garages. Take-up is encouraging—which suggests that, despite the long queues, many people do not prize the opportunity to park close to their homes.
It’s a sign of the times in Kolkata
A more obvious solution would be to charge more for permits. But that is politically fraught. Amsterdammers believe they have a right to park near their homes, explains Pieter Litjens, the deputy mayor in charge of transport. (They also believe they should be able to leave their bicycles absolutely anywhere for nothing, which is another headache.) So the queues for permits are likely to grow. Amsterdam expects to build 50,000 more homes before 2025, which will mean between 20,000 and 30,000 more cars.
Even more than in America’s sprawling cities, car parking in Amsterdam is unsightly. “The canals are beautiful, and cars are parked along them all the time,” laments Mr Litjens. The city would love to sweep them away, but that would be unpopular. So in one district, De Pijp, a bold (and expensive) remedy is under way. Engineers have drained a canal and are digging an underground garage with 600 parking spaces into the marshy ground beneath. When the car park is finished and sealed, the canal will be refilled with water. The city will then abolish 273 parking spaces on the streets above.
Other cities lauded for their excellent public transport and enthusiasm for market-based solutions to traffic problems also have a blind spot when it comes to residents’ parking. Much of inner London, for example, is covered with residents’ parking zones. The permits are often even cheaper than in Amsterdam: Kensington and Chelsea charges between £80 ($100) and £219 a year for the right to park anywhere in the borough and on the fringe of nearby Westminster. Visitors, on the other hand, must pay between £1.20 and £4.60 an hour. Given that the average home in Kensington and Chelsea sold for £1.9m last year, residents’ parking represents a gift to some of Britain’s richest people.
Despite being the home of Lyft and Uber, two car-sharing services, San Francisco is similarly generous. It charges just $127 a year for residents’ permits. Unlike Amsterdam, though, San Francisco does not cap the number, and in some neighbourhoods one and a half are issued for every parking space. The result is a perpetual scrap for empty kerb. A survey in 2015 found that 53% of permit-holders had spent at least five minutes looking for a space at the end of their most recent trip, and 7% more than half an hour.
As San Francisco’s infuriated drivers cruise around, they crowd the roads and pollute the air. This is a widespread hidden cost of under-priced street parking. Mr Shoup has estimated that cruising for spaces in Westwood village, in Los Angeles, amounts to 950,000 excess vehicle miles travelled per year. Westwood is tiny, with only 470 metered spaces.
There is, however, one exception to the rule that residential parking must never be subjected to market forces. In the 1950s, when it was still far from rich, Japan began to require city-dwellers who did not have parking spaces in their buildings to purchase them. These days anybody who wishes to buy a car must first show a receipt for a space. He or she had better use it: any vehicle without one left on the roadside will be removed by the police in the middle of the night.
Parking brake
Freed of cars, the narrow residential streets of Tokyo are quieter than in other big cities. Every so often a courtyard or spare patch of land has been turned into a car park—some more expensive than others. Takaomi Kondoh, who works for a firm that manages buildings and car parks, explains that prices are usually higher close to transport hubs, because commuters compete for those spaces. Near the central station in Tama, a suburb, the going rate is ¥17,000 per month ($150). Ten minutes’ walk away it drops to ¥10,000.
Once you become accustomed to the idea that city streets are only for driving and walking, and not for parking, it is difficult to imagine how it could possibly be otherwise. Mr Kondoh is so perplexed by an account of a British suburb, with its kerbside commons, that he asks for a diagram. Your correspondent tries to draw his own street, with large rectangles for houses, a line representing the kerb and small rectangles showing all the parked cars. The small rectangles take up a surprising amount of room.
On the Beeb: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39847740
Sometimes cars mistake the cycle ways for roads, because they are so wide
Yes, the CTC didn't want to be banned from the road by the provision of bikepaths.
I always get shot down over this but when I took my motorcycle test I used a 1974 copy of the Highway Code which clearly had a blue bike sign denoted "Cycle Lane" (compulsory)Sadly that was true. I have a paper copy of a Highway Code from 1972 which clearly shows a blue round sign as a compulsory cycle and moped route. I do not know when the compulsion was removed, especially since the round blue sign still indicates compulsion on the continent.
if the original cycle lanes were just for bikes but they could also use the road then the cycle lane would have the no vehicles sign (in case its width wasn't enough of a clue), no need for any cycle on it at all like every other road without provisionNo vehicles means no bikes as well. You'd need no motor vehicles, which is a different sign.
not sure why compulsory cycle lanes in the UK raises such hackles when that's exactly what the sign means on the continent so why would the UK make ambiguous ones? (and we've been having this exact same argument on various fora for about 15 years now) but that's exactly how they were described in apparently 3 editions of the HC, I'm not really interested in why but it's a fact
as in Blue = mostly compulsion Red = mostly prohibition and Green = mostly information which is how every page of signs was described,
if the original cycle lanes were just for bikes but they could also use the road then the cycle lane would have the no vehicles sign (in case its width wasn't enough of a clue), no need for any cycle on it at all like every other road without provisionNo vehicles means no bikes as well. You'd need no motor vehicles, which is a different sign.
not sure why compulsory cycle lanes in the UK raises such hackles when that's exactly what the sign means on the continent so why would the UK make ambiguous ones? (and we've been having this exact same argument on various fora for about 15 years now) but that's exactly how they were described in apparently 3 editions of the HC, I'm not really interested in why but it's a fact
as in Blue = mostly compulsion Red = mostly prohibition and Green = mostly information which is how every page of signs was described,
As a matter of interest, you can see both the 1968 and 1974 versions online (http://normandyhistorians.co.uk/hwc/1968hwc/). The sign of interest is on page 37.I always get shot down over this but when I took my motorcycle test I used a 1974 copy of the Highway Code which clearly had a blue bike sign denoted "Cycle Lane" (compulsory)Sadly that was true. I have a paper copy of a Highway Code from 1972 which clearly shows a blue round sign as a compulsory cycle and moped route. I do not know when the compulsion was removed, especially since the round blue sign still indicates compulsion on the continent.