The long-standing and simmering parking wars in one corner of Bristol has blown up again, after an anonymous resident began putting signs on parked cars urging their owners to ‘park on your own street’.
The notes were put onto a number of different vehicles on British Road in Bedminster, and purport to be written on behalf of ‘the residents of British Road’. The signs, which were taped to the outside of the windscreens of the vehicles, appeared overnight on Saturday into Sunday morning.
It is unclear exactly how many had been affixed in total, because more may have been removed before they were photographed. The sign read: “Dear vehicle owner/driver, The residents of British Road have noticed that you park on this street regularly, yet do not live on this street.
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“Please be mindful of the residents who wish to park near their own properties. We respectfully ask you to park your vehicle on the street that you live on, in future,” it ended.
One of the notices was attached to an unmarked van, which had a ‘BT engineer on call' sign inside the vehicle on the dashboard. On this vehicle, a hand-written addition to the pre-printed notice read: “YOU DO NOT WORK FOR BT!!!”
Another note, this one hand-written, claimed that a van had been left unattended and added in underlined capitals: "Help yourself." One resident of British Road, who wished to remain anonymous, said she was concerned by the appearance of the signs.
“Parking is an absolute nightmare around here, and people spend a lot of time driving around looking for a space, so I understand people get frustrated, but this is a bit sinister. Whoever wrote this does not speak for everyone on this road at all. How do they know the people who own those vehicles don’t live nearby?
"Do they keep watch all the time, and then follow them to see where they go when they park up? As a woman driver, I’d be worried if that appeared on my car, wondering who was following me to check where I lived,” she added.
“And because parking is a nightmare here, you do sometimes have to park a fair distance away from where you live. There are too many cars and not enough street. But the main thing is, whoever posted this note doesn’t seem to realise they have no greater claim over the road outside where they live than anyone else.
“It’s not their road, it’s everyone’s. There’s no residents’ parking scheme here, there’s no restrictions, people can park where they like for however long they want. If this notice-writer wants to guarantee they can park their car outside their home, they need to move to a house with its own drive,” she added.
Bedminster’s parking wars have been simmering for several years now, and appear to have got worse post-Covid with more people working from home. Last year, one van parked up in a street near British Road had a sign posted on it complaining that its owner had parked it in Bedminster to avoid the Southville Residents Parking Zone on the other side of North Street.
In the Victorian terraced streets around Compass Point Primary School - close to where these signs were placed over the weekend - residents told the city council in a recent survey that they often struggled to find a parking spot, and last year, Avon Fire and Rescue Service warned that some of the streets were inaccessible to fire engines in an emergency because of people parking on street corners or on both sides of the narrowest roads.
Last month, several parents at Compass Point Primary School, and residents of nearby South Road said they were worried that double side parking near the school - which meant vehicles were having to reverse past the school or around corners to get past each other - could cause an accident at school pick-up time each afternoon.
As it is close to the A38 West Street and the Airport Bus service, this area of Bedminster also experiences holidaymakers parking for free for a week or a fortnight at a time and getting the airport bus to catch their flights.
Read more on Bedminster's parking nightmares:
- Fed-up residents make own double yellow lines in protest at pavement parking
- Two-up-two-down terraced home being turned into 7 bed HMO is 'appalling'
- 'Liveable neighbourhood' proposed for South Bristol to reduce rat runs
- Slow down to save South Bristol's surprising new otter population, drivers told
- Calls for new parking zones for Bedminster and Ashton Gate
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