Car parking at junction Thames Street and Nine Acres.

Mon 9 Mar 2015, 13:53 (last edited on Mon 9 Mar 2015, 13:57)

I'm afraid I don't agree with you Rachel, and I think that Mark Sulik's comments are spot-on. Some of what you say seems to me both over-emotional and factually fairly questionable. This is by no stretch of the imagination a 'very busy junction', and as Paul Butler rightly says, there is good visibility and no-one taking the corner at a remotely sensible speed and with correct positioning should have any problem. Buses are not being obstructed, as even with cars (illegally) double-parked there is room for them to get through; if cars are parked only on one side then there is a lot of room, more, indeed, than on many other roads in the centre of town. The junction is not being obstructed, as perfectly reasonably there are already yellow lines close to it, and unrestricted parking starts well up from it. Finally I'm completely baffled by the stuff about elderly people and the cemetery. If parking here is as dangerous as you're making out, why do you think our older residents are safe parking there? That one seems to me to get at the heart of things here. Are we complaining that there is a safety issue, or do we object to train-users taking on-street spaces because we want them for ourselves? Clearly it can't logically be both.

On every previous occasion that yellow lines have been slapped down gung-ho, the situation has been exactly as Mark has described it, with station commuters who have no-where else to go (or residents who can't park in the obvious spaces because they're occupied by commuters) just moving to the next available free spaces, precipitating a new round of complaints, and making the overall parking situation worse. Large numbers of people live and work in the historic centre of Charlbury, and others come in to shop, eat, go to the dentist, and so on. Every ill-considered new parking restriction simply makes life more stressful, more difficult, and more inconvenient for all of them, and strangles life in the town. Either we need residents' only and short-term only on street - which I personally would rather not see - or we need to be less keen to rush to the conclusion that that 'something must be done'.