Parking in Balham is being restricted more and more Post Reply

[readysteadycook]

New this week  - Did you know the Balham Waitrose Car Park now had ANPR cameras to check you have paid properly ? So no quick dash in for some food talking nicely to the car park attendant to not be fined ! 

It’s also now only 1hr free, and that’s only if you buy £10 in Waitrose (refunded parking in store at a machine).

Great I hear you say, there is Sainsburys where I can park for free for 2 hours … well not for long as my source tells me, as (the very anti car) Wandsworth council who surprisingly control Sainsburys Carpark, is talking about reducing the free time to just 1hr.

#RIP Balham 

[muddyboots]

I’m very annoyed at this.

Waitrose car park was operating just fine and it’s empty at night.
I was using if in the evening very late once a week and now I can’t as over an hour .

They also make it impossible to pop in by car and just get something quickly.
You have to TYPE your own registration who’s is a PITA then you have to TYPE the stupid code yoy get if you spend over £10.

Nobody will pop in for a forgotten item by car unless over £10.
It’s a huge annoyance for picking up John Lewis online parcels as you need to faff - I used to park and leave within 5 min and just tell the guard I’m getting a parcel.

As for the council ; they hate the high street . They don’t care about local businesses.
They put up parking costs all over Wandsworth a couple of heads ago if near a high street .
They keep raising the barrier to easy shopping.

We can’t all walk to shops and carry heavy shopping or go in the rain etc
Many shop when already out and about on the way from or to somewhere by car .

It’s ridiculous

[muddyboots]

And I say before you RIP Wandsworth… get your opinion heard.
Contact the council, speak to Sainsbury’s etc

[chorister]

If you check I think you will find that it was Waitrose who applied for planning permission for the cameras, not the Council that imposed them.  But don't let the facts get in the way of a rant about the Council and cars.

[ElecticianNappValley]

Sainsburys car park is NOT controlled by Wandsworth council . I also believe Wandsworth are a lot better than many other London councils

[dimelda]

Well said, Chorister.

Muddy Boots:  You're just 'popping in' to get something quickly or collect a parcel - yet you need a car to do that!?!  Unbelievable.  Unless you're disabled, the word lazy springs to mind.

Living locally, most of us CAN walk to the shops & do our shopping.  In the real world, we even walk in the rain.  Fancy that!   I'm not young and always walk to the shops & back.  If the shopping's heavy, I take a bus home, which undoubtedly you can do.  If no bus going your way, take a minicab or Uber home.  If whoever's imposing these restrictions is doing so in order to reduce the unacceptable number of motorists on the road, I'm all for it.

 

[SouthLondonDaddy]

In other Waitrose car parks they will give you free parking if you collect a John Lewis parcel - as long as the parcel cost the same as the minimum spend they have for the supermarket. Does the Balham one not do it, too?

Neighbouring Lambeth is even worse. They don't allow free motorcycle parking, and they only cancelled the disastrous Streatham LTN because TfL and Khan intervened; all residents were telling them bus disruptions had become unacceptable, but the council didn't listen till Khan was forced to admit the problem was bad. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68511760

[chorister]

SouthLondonDaddy - some very good friends of ours live in Valley Road which was in the Streatham LTN. A survey of all the residents in the road was organised and supported it by a big majority because it reduced traffic. Maybe don’t believe everything you read in the Daily Fail - don’t you think some inconvenience / sacrifice is worth it to stop our cities being overwhelmed by traffic?

[SouthLondonDaddy]

@chorister I don't read the Daily Fail, thank you very much. You may have missed it, but the link I posted was from a BBC story, it was not the tweet ae climate change denier.

May I humbly remind you that Khan and TfL had to declare a major incident, because of all the disruption to the bus service? https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/mayor-of-lon ... atham-ltn/

Which was it - was the disruption real, or was Khan a petrolhead, there was never any disruption and it was all fake news? I shall be looking forward to your answer. Take your time.

I am all for inconveniencing car drivers (especially where public transport alternatives do exist), but inconveniencing bus users, can you please kind explain to me what the logic would be there? These people are already doing the right thing by taking the bus and not the car.... and we punish them? Why??? On what planet does that make sense, can you please explain?

And you cannot say: it's  not the LTN's fault, it's car drivers' fault.
That's like saying: no, folks, it's not that my policy against knife violence isn't working, it's that stubborn criminals are refusing to give up their knives!!!
LTNs were supposed to reduce car use. If they don't, it means the policy doesn't work.

I should add that it's quite silly to close roads left right and centre, not do anything else (no road charging, no improvement to public transport, nothing) and to magically expect traffic to vanish.

It is also quite striking that there seems to be no logic and no studies on what makes an LTN work or fail. Surely we cannot expect an LTN to work as well in the very centre of London, with good public transport links, as  on the cusp between inner and outer London, in an area, like Streathm, with relatively poor transport links???

[chorister]

@SouthLondonDaddy - now that I have recovered from the shock of reading a considered and thought through response let me take up your challenge to try to answer. But first - my apologies for accusing you of reading the Daily Fail …..

There are I think two ways of looking at this. First of all there is the detailed issue of whether eg a bus route is disrupted etc; and then there is the generic impact of our more or less unquestioned sense of entitlement to more and more consumption and convenience. I suspect that over the next 24 to 72 hours we are going to see played out graphically on our TV screens from Florida the impact of that sense of entitlement - anyone who can’t grasp that the Caribbean storing more energy (as heat, as a result of rising GHG concentrations which correlate with our rising standard of living) will result in increasingly serious storms must have been asleep.

I think we are probably heading over the next 20-40 years into a change as profound as the Industrial Revolution, but in the other direction - instead of being able to aspire to always having more and more we are likely to have to make serious choices. Whether to clear cars off the roads to make way for buses is just a trivial example of that, and certainly won’t work out to everyone’s satisfaction every time. But in the overall scheme of things it’s pretty trivial. And actually the fact that it generates so much comment is a good thing because it raises the whole issue up the agenda.

So I hope I’m wrong but the answer to you I think is that the change we face will be difficult and inconvenient and will involve sacrifices but in the end there will probably be no alternative. Mistakes will be made, and crazy schemes tried, just as they were in the Industrial Revolution, but that’s how we progress. And I think we would do much better to give politicians, even those we disagree with, the benefit of the doubt and assume they are doing their best.

And I would ban the online sale of all knives, and think about shops that sell knives having to be licensed.

[SouthLondonDaddy]

@chorister We probably agree on quite a few things. Maybe the main difference is that I am well aware that policies which mean well may be flawed, if not outright counterproductive.

The Streatham LTN was counterproductive.

Removing bus lanes from Vauxhall bridge, Waterloo Bridge, Regent street and elsewhere has been counterproductive - the exact opposite of what we need to do

Hackney charging motorcycles as much as cars is ideological

Opposing nuclear energy is ideological and anti-scientific

Etc etc etc

[chorister]

Don’t get me started on ideologies …..

However people do have to have space to try things and make mistakes - but must be willing to learn from them and change course. Especially on the climate stuff (I have a science degree and have been into it for over 20 years) the solutions are neither obvious, easy nor necessarily common sense.

But one step of course might be an SMR on Wandsworth Common …..

[muddyboots]

Chorister,
I fully know Waitrose applied for the parking cameras. My comment about Wandsworth was to the original poster who said Wandsworth own the Sainsbury’s car park. I don’t know if correct or not.

Dimelda,
Are you feeling OK?
I’ve seen your posts numerous times and noted that you are often attacking people with opinionated vitriol and offending narrow minded remarks.

I don’t need to explain myself to you, however I few the urge to clarify that people have different circumstances and lives and it doesn’t make anyone’s lazy if they pop into the shops when on the way from a to b by car already or have kids or heavy parcels …. Who are you to pass such judgment.

[chorister]

@muddyboots - fair enough.  I guess Waitrose did it because so many people abused it for cheap parking.  It's maddening that the Flowbird app no longer works.

On the wider point - for your children's sake think through the impacts that our lifestyles have and will have in future.  I have already mentioned Florida above - noone really doubts that climate change is the principle cause.  Here's another prediction, also based on the basic physics - if you take Mediterranean holidays then more and more severe and longer heatwaves are going to make them increasingly problematic.  The same heatwaves will affect the supply of foods from around the southern Mediterranean fringes.  

We have been warned .........

[SouthLondonDaddy]

@chorister Climate change is real and may have made hurricanes worse (I'd love to hear some reasonable sources that aren't the Guardian or the Daily Mail), but it has most certainly not created them out of the blue.

Florida has been hit by hurricanes since forever. Spanish explorers had their fleet almost decimated by hurricanes some 500 years ago - was that climate change, too?

On the Streatham LTN, I didn't quite understand your point: do you agree it was an unmitigated disaster which disrupted the bus service?