I went along to a neighbourhood meeting yesterday, called in response to Land Services proposal to introduce a Controlled Parking Zone (CPZ) in our area…

Around here there are a lot of businesses, and because of its proximity to the city centre, there are a lot of cars during the day parked in the area. It starts filling up around 7.00am – is full by 8.00am and doesn’t start emptying out until around 5.30pm of an afternoon. It’s tough for the residents if you need to use the car during the day. Once you leave your spot, it takes about 30 minutes on your return to find something on the hill – not outside your property but somewhere on the hill which is about a 1/2 mile radius. Sucks if you don’t keep regular 9-5 office hours…. anyway…

In response to residents complaints that there should be designated “resident only” parking – the Land Services Department has come up with this ridiculous CPZ proposal. What they are suggesting is that those residents who meet certain criteria (a) they have a car registered here; (b) they live here; and (c) that their building was zoned residential prior to Jan 1st, 2000 – to stop new property developers from not putting in their own parking – they can pay Glasgow city council another £150 per year for a disc that they can stick on their car for the right to park at home if they can find a spot!. You see, the CPZ proposal does not actually guarantee resident parking. What they are planning on doing is setting up ‘pay & display’ parking metres of 3 hour max duration, and with a parking disc – a resident has a right not to have to pay. For those residents who initially complained to the city – the ones who have to leave during the day – this won’t make the slightest difference. People will just be out feeding metres each day. There still won’t be any spaces between 8-5.30 during the week – and worse, the metres will be valid from 8am till 10pm 6 DAYS A WEEK! So forget about having visitors, they’ll all have to pay metre parking!!!

As you can imagine, there was a lot of heated discussion. The land services guy initially claimed that we could have our say and that our points would be considered, however by the end of the meeting it was quite clear that this was not only the proposal, but the fait accompli. Damn shame really. I’m going to join the neighbourhood – Fight Back – group and see what I can do, but I won’t be holding my breath. Instead I’ll be juggling our finances again, to see where we can find the additional £150 a year – that is providing we qualify, you see our building wasn’t converted until 2001 – which may be another problem to resolve.