Every year more and more cars use our streets increasing pressures on already overcrowded roads. In many places residents now find it difficult to park anywhere near their homes. This can present major difficulties to some people, for example parents with young children, people carrying heavy shopping, and the elderly and less mobile people, and seriously affects their quality of life. Areas where there is very heavy pressure on parking space are often found near railway stations, shops, hospitals and colleges. Sometimes quite a large area is affected, but in other cases problems are concentrated in just a few streets.
A Controlled Parking Zone (CPZ) can sometimes resolve these difficulties. The main purpose of CPZs is to manage overcrowding. They help to control intrusive parking by limiting or eliminating commuter parking and giving priority to residents and to short term parking for shoppers, visitors and social users.
The Council also uses CPZs to help the regeneration of town centres within the Borough. All space other than residents and business parking space in a CPZ is short stay space. This ensures that there is more space available for people making short trips to the shops or to use local facilities.
CPZs also help to improve the local quality of life by removing obstructive parking from junctions and corners and allowing free access for local people and the Emergency Services.
FAQs
Does Lewisham set up Controlled Parking Zones (CPZs) simply to make money?
Whilst Lewisham does make money from parking, and we would never seek to deny that, this is not the primary aim of parking controls.
Lewisham will not introduce parking controls unless a majority of residents who respond to consultation are in favour of a scheme. We do not seek to impose controls where residents don't want them.
However, parking controls also serve a traffic management purpose. Areas where residents request parking controls are very often around stations.
Residents find that parking during the day in roads close to stations becomes virtually impossible because all the space is taken up by commuters. If we can limit end destination parking we can start to influence the mode of transport people choose.
Naturally we would like to see commuters travel their entire journey on public transport rather than cause congestion on the roads and clog up our residential streets by commuting, often from out of the borough, to stations within Lewisham, parking and then continuing by train from there.
Can you give me a straightforward summary of the advantages and disadvantages of being in a CPZ?
The advantages of a CPZ are:
- f you have difficulty parking near your home because of commuter or shopper parking a CPZ will normally resolve the problem
- driveways and junctions will be yellow lined improving visibility and road safety
- people are very unlikely to park across your driveway (in a CPZ a yellow line is marked across all driveways)
- parking near local shops will be easier because there will be Pay and Display bays ensuring a more rapid turnover in the use of the space
- if fewer people are driving up and down the road looking for parking space there will be less traffic in your road, less pollution and tempers will be less frayed.
- the reduction in on-street parking will enhance the street environment.
There are a few disadvantages to CPZs:
- you will need to pay for permits for your visitors (at £1 for a half-day and £2 for a full day) or they will need to park in a Pay and Display (P&D) bay. The current P&D tariff is 20p for the first 20 minutes and 10 per 10 minutes thereafter
- you will need to remember that you always display a permit during the operating hours of the zone.