Over the past few days I have been thinking. Of course this is a very dangerous thing to do but I was prepared to take the risk. The subject of my thoughts was the roll out of the SPA and if there is a better alternative.

When the plans to extend the current SPA were first drawn up it was mentioned there was no intention of extending the current network of yellow lines and parking restrictions. Somehow I can see the temptation of extra income becoming too much to resist.

From what I can see there are two sides to parking. Firstly the residents want to be able to park outside their houses and secondly there is the issue of the extra income a scheme such as the SPA can generate. With the current SPA the residents have to pay to park even if there is not a space and an army of enforcement officers constantly patrol the streets waiting to hand out tickets. The enforcement officers are paid to just walk round and most of their time is wasted.

So is there an alternative. Well yes. The people should be able to pay a small sum based on the frontage of their house so they can “hire” the stretch of road outside their house to park their own cars on. This would mean the residents would be guaranteed parking outside their house. If anyone else parked there a phone call could be made to a control centre to send an enforcement officer to ticket or tow away the car. The small fee could be collected at the same time as the Council Tax and a sign could be issued to residents so they could indicate the parking restriction on that stretch of road.

In my idea the powers that be could get extra income and the residents would be guaranteed a parking space. The enforcement officers would only need to visit when an offence had been committed meaning their time would not be wasted aimlessly walking around the streets. No doubt my idea will fall foul of the red tape, bureaucracy and any other hurdles that can be dreamed up to prevent it from being implemented but it would be much fairer than the current SPA. What do you think?
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The author has left comments at 00.53, 21.16 on 09/02/08 only. Any other comments left in the authors name are therefore NOT genuine.