Council "investigating" after driver outrage at cycle hangar "deliberately" blocking car parking spaces

If you consider that you have to be able to put your bike in, I'm not clear how they do that safely in that location*. They have installed the entrance facing the road, so to put the bike away you have to faff around standing in the road. It can't be installed 90 degrees around as drivers are quite likely to attempt to block it, bumper up against the hanger, and 180 degrees there is a fence in the way. 

*Obvs. not that a driver would ever endanger anyone with a bike, would they?

A) why should park users have to give up space?

B) if it takes 10-20 mins to find a space, why not take the first you find and walk (assuming no disability, for which there would presumably be a reserved space)?

im a cyclist and think its a great idea but taking up car parking spaces is the wrong thing to do, all's it does is create more bad feeling between car drivers and cyclists, if their is space else wear that should have been used wherever possible.

The motorists are bitching because they've been cheated out of one space. The cyclists meanwhile have been cheated out of six. Who has the grievance here?

In any case, it looks like the original end bay impinges on the access to the park and probably should never have existed.

Another reply to the original Facebook post(link is external) came from a motorist who says he pays "£235 a year, up from £195 last year" for a parking permit and "often spends ten to 20 minutes trying to park near my house. Please explain what I am paying for, and how these overpriced boxes are acceptable?"

The bleating of these people is the same as the atempts of other addicts to justify smoking or gambling- there's no point in arguing with them. The council is doing a good job, unless they give in to the hyper-junk press readers, who are generally all in favour of 'market forces', until they are affected themselves. The council just needs to repaint the parking spaces to accommodate reasonably sized city cars and there could be just as many car parking spaces- more 'market forces' and fewer Chelsea Tractors

"This hangar would only take up one space but the thing is they could have put it in a corner of the park. I think they are being used to take up car parking spaces."

Or to paraphrase..."They should move their six vehicles off the road so I can store my one vehicle in the same space instead"

"£235 a year, up from £195 last year" for a parking permit and "often spends ten to 20 minutes trying to park near my house. Please explain what I am paying for"

This is the sentence that stands out for me.  I'd expect you're paying for the right to park in any marked bay eligible as part of the scheme, irrespective of where it is.

What they expect is, I want to park outside my house. So how many cars are attached to the houses in that row that also want to park outside their houses, how many bays are potentially available in that area etc.  The two may not be compatible.   You don't own the space outside your house - tough.  I may spend 10-20 minutes looking for spaces in busy car parks,  just because I want to park there doesn't mean I've got the right to.

(If Brighton have sold 10,000 permits for 1,000 spaces, then I'm all for this scheme)

It's a bit like like a proportion of Muricans and guns isn't it?

Suggest or try to introduce anything that might in some way ever so slightly inconvenience the gun/car owner (and even some things that probably won't) to make things better/safer/more pleasant for society as a whole, let alone enhance the experience of owners of a different thing (like bikes or school books) and the vocal minority have a melt down. 

"They're coming for our guns/cars!" 

The currently privileged always see progress elsewhere as somehow taking things away / discriminating against them, rather than seeing beyond the end of their own bonnet/barrel. 

PS I recognise that this may well have opened the door for Nige & his various personas (one of them must be a gun-toting hillbilly?) - my apologies.  I've tuned them out now, I just think of him as a less amusing Roger

Here's the core of our trouble with mass motoring with cars writ large.  The fact that we've quietly and gradually enacted the biggest privatisation of public "goods" since the enclosures.  It's the tragedy of people getting wildly aggrieved as the things they were encouraged, nay, almost strongarmed into having start losing their subsidies.  And they discover that their vehicles are not just far more expensive than they thought but they are (societally) unaffordable.

Probably belongs over on the "Drivers and their problems" thread but meantime this plays out as "but I've already paid good money for a permit..." and "I don't mind one less space (6 bikes...), but you want to take away two!" and "Where am I gonna park?  We could park right outside before - we've had to convert both garages, since the car we first bought was too big to fit in them anyway..." and "My mother moved in with us / our kids are growing up - where are we supposed to put their cars?"

It probably just needs a bit of better communication from all involved. My understanding of these is that they are designed to fit within parking spaces, enabling bike parking in areas where people may not have storage facilities and not that they are just placed in a parking space with no thought. As with many parking facilities, the permit is providing permission to park, not a guaranteed space.

Every day we get more stories of climate change, obesity, health, congestion, pollution and road deaths and everyone tut-tuts and say something should be done.  But when someone does something that adresses all those problems at very little cost, they all say "I didn't mean something like that."

I'm beginning to despair of the human race, when so many people can be so blinkered, selfish and stupid to condemn their descendants to fire, floods, storms, starvation, death and destruction because they love their cars.