Tuesday 18 December 2007

Questions of enforcement

Rosebank Villas is the short passageway between Walthamstow High Street and the bus station. It is, in its entirety, a pedestrian zone. Loading is only permitted outside the hours of 10 am - 4 pm. And most days at least one vehicle can be seen flagrantly flouting the parking restriction on a regular day-long basis. It has no disabled badge or any other feature which might exempt it. It is often accompanied by others, and on Saturday afternoons there can be as many as six vehicles double-parked here, with hundreds of bus station users having to squeeze between to get past.

What is remarkable, of course, is that this is one of the most highly patrolled areas of the Borough when it comes to parking enforcement. And yet every day parking attendants walk by taking no action. This is quite clearly instititutionalised. No vehicle which parks here will ever get a ticket, And I cannot understand why. Not that this is the only kind of turning-a-blind-eye which occurs in the London Borough of Waltham Forest...




















The sign on Rosebank Villas (below) is quite unambiguous.



















Another example. Motorbikes are not permitted to be parked on the pavement, and when the licence plate is obscured parking attendants are empowered to remove any covering. Yet all over the Borough motor bikes can be seen illegally parked on the footway at the same location on a regular daily basis (like the one below, on Gaywood Road) and the attendants walk by, making no effort to issue a ticket. Somebody should be asking why.