Parking in the southern part of Hollingdean is a “mess” and the area could be a priority when councillors look at where to bring in new controlled zones next year.
The verdict was delivered at a council committee meeting today (Tuesday 5 December) where a petition was due to presented.
It was signed by 304 people but no one was at Hove Town Hall to hand it in to Brighton and Hove City Council’s Transport and Sustainability Committee.
The petition called for people in south Hollingdean to be consulted about the creation of a controlled parking zone after a scheme proposed for the wider Hollingdean area was rejected in October.
Labour councillor Trevor Muten said that he understood why people from south Hollingdean had started their petition calling for a residents’ parking scheme.
One of those involved asked not to be identified because of the controversy and “strong feelings” about a potential controlled parking zone in the area.
A presentation sent to councillors described residents’ experiences and frustrations about drivers from other areas parking their cars in Hollingdean.
One of the examples given in the presentation was John, who asked to have only his first name used.
The presentation said: “John, a resident of Hollingbury Crescent, feels angry and let down by the council.
“John has had to deal with verbal and physical abuse outside his home from non-residents fighting over parking spaces and regularly finds his car damaged from people squeezing into small gaps.
“As a young family, they’ve been struggling for years, unable to park near their property, with regular trips to hospital for a sick child made unnecessarily difficult and an overwhelming feeling of dread when they return home knowing they’ll be unable to park anywhere close to their home.”
Councillor Muten, who chairs the council’s Transport and Sustainability Committee, said that the committee debated the issue extensively in October.
He said: “I recommend an effective residents’ parking scheme in south Hollingdean is considered as a priority when the ‘parking scheme priority timetable update report’ is presented to this committee next year.
“In response to my recommendation, I am given to understand that officers will ensure this petition is considered when outlining the way forward.”
At Hove Town Hall, Green councillor Steve Davis said that parking in south Hollingdean was a “hot mess”.
He said: “I know plenty of people who live in that area. It’s a disaster, the parking there, and it’s only going to get worse. I genuinely think we need to look at this again.”
Councillor Davis called for a report sooner than the next “parking scheme priority timetable update report” but was unable to persuade the Labour-dominated committee which agreed merely to note the petition.
It is interesting that it takes the input from a councillor from another ward to step to put pressure on this situation. Thank you councillor Davis. Once again, our councillors in Hollingdean and Fiveways continue to be less than useless. Fowler and her non-resident pals should be ashamed. They are an absolute disgrace.
Residents of South Hollingdean could have a very low cost parking scheme. The reason for the very low cost being a sort of ‘compensation’ for reduced spaces during the day due to free parking for council staff working in the immediate area. Council staff and residents having 2 different w/s identifier stickers.
Why should Hollingdean residents have to make space for council workers? Surely it’s up to the council to provide off-road parking spaces for their workers, at the rubbish and bus depots.
Councillor Davis called for a report sooner than the next “parking scheme tax raising priority timetable update report
How is that council staff have allocated spaces yet in the same instance health care professionals are banned from parking within a mile of any hospital or gp ?.
Because we don’t get specific advantages for parking, with the exception of a dedicated doctor bay, or under specific conditions, which would have no change with any proposals.
Why must Councillor Davis do the heavy lifting and talking for us? Where are the Fiveways and Hollingdean councillors? Fowler et al. should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Their lack of involvement in this, whilst other councillors step up in their place, makes them look utterly incompetent or – even worse – totally out of touch.
To be fair, Cllr Davis has a particular interest in this subject as a driver instructor.
Dispite parking permits being overwhelmingly rejected by residents from all over Brighton, the Green council used devious methods to force it on people anyway!
Now a new council administration is going to use the same devious methods!
So much for democracy!
And they wonder why people don’t bother to vote?
Parking permits was overwhelmingly rejected by the residents of Hollingdean because they’ve seen by other areas, that not only does it not take into consideration, that;
A) It doesn’t guarantee you a parking space outside your home.
B) That it doesn’t take into consideration that a family of 2,3 or 4 people In that household might have cars! It is their fundamental right to use whatever method they like to get around!
C) As a friend of a resident of Hollingdean, what it will do, is put an extra £160 on your council tax and it will go up continuously to fund the shortfall in the money the council no longer gets from central government. .
Is this how council’s are going to fund themselves from now on? By persecuting and hounding motorist relentlessly???
Anyone that wants this is proof about the English, that turkeys really do vote for Christmas!
The British really do love having their noses pushed into the dirt
“a friend of a resident of Hollingdean”, not an actual resident of Hollingdean then, or one of the 304 residents who struggle with parking on a daily basis.
Suggesting residents are ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’, is both ridiculous and offensive when you consider Hollingdean has been made an island surrounded by CPZs and has to cope with displaced vehicles from across the city. Residents of Hollingdean only want to reclaim their streets so they can get on with their lives again, without having to constantly struggle to park and have their homes turned into a free car park for the rest of the city.
And as for the argument it doesn’t guarantee a space, any one can look at existing areas where CPZs have been bought in, including around Hollingbury Road, Fiveways and Bear Road and see how many spaces there are compared to the cramped and over-burdened streets in Hollingdean.
Does that mean that that the 60% of residents who responded the to the last council survey and rejected the parking scheme can now be ignored?
Its seems highly coincidental that 304 residents who have submitted a petition rejecting the majority view of no parking restrictions is pretty much equal to the 305 residents who supported parking permits and were in the minority at 40%
It looks like those who shout loudest and campaign online can just keep demanding change until the council gives in whilst the silent majority who live in the area are ignored- it doesn’t sound like democracy to me
The petition was created over a much smaller area to demonstrate majority support in a smaller zone. Those roads that previously voted against a scheme have been removed from the proposed new zone, so they won’t be getting a CPZ as they didn’t want one.
For context, that’s 300+ responses in the petition, covering an area of approximately 800 homes.
Totally agree, what happened to democracy.
Contact the Ombudsman.
If you have to go for parking controls, try Light Touch, it stops the spillover.
I wonder where Mr Philips lives? Not sure about ‘overwhelmingly rejected’ being very accurate. As a Davey Drive resident and one who unashamedly voted in favour of a resident scheme, I was given to understand by the feedback from council and councillors that a slight majority echoed my views. Which made the apparent cancellation of the proposed scheme strange to say the least. My fuel bill has increased immeasurably over the past few years due to driving around the estate every time I come home and have to look for a parking spot that is safe and legal! It’s becoming more of an issue as I approach my mid seventies to walk uphill 2 to 3 hundred yards and the same back to my home after my essential journeys are complete. The problem has worsened thanks to the council’s determination to bring in more and more student accommodation in the Lewes Road area without providing sufficient parking for student’s cars. It appears every student nowadays has to own a car and leave it miles from their place of abode or learning for days and weeks on end! Don’t start me on Council workers from the recycling plant leaving vehicles at the bottom of Davey Drive and elsewhere when surely there is space in the Council yard for workers? It’s a shame we don’t see traffic wardens (or whatever their PC title is nowadays) making regular patrols because they’d have a field day on all the vehicles on double yellow lines all day, every day. Oh, and just so I get my money’s worth, how do we stop just about every vehicle using Davey Drive as a race track? It appears no-one observes the 20mph limit let alone keeping to 30mph. At night, the norm is 40 to 60mph. With a school and any number of young families around here, someone is going to get hurt soon.
Source for this please Simon?
“ Dispite parking permits being overwhelmingly rejected by residents from all over Brighton…”
I’d really like it if you could provide even one example where an area voted against permits but had them implemented anyway.
In this instance, this is a small area of Hollingdean that is asking for, and had consistently been asking for parking restrictions, for many years. The results for these roads speak for themselves: massive majority support every consultation but outweighed by the wider area. They aren’t asking for areas of Hollingdean that haven’t voted in support to be included. Surely that’s the exact opposite of your point?
Just wait until the locals find out what the council will charge for their residents permits.
It’ll be in line with every other zone of that type.
What is needed is a light touch scheme to prevent vehicles that don’t move an inch from one week to the next. These are usually vehicles from nearby areas that don’t have permits elsewhere, or students that infrequently use their cars who live in nearby controlled areas
Have a 1 HR CPZ from 7 to 8 pm. This would still allow parking for nearby workers, but banish non residential long term parking
With respect Spencer, that wouldn’t be enough. I note you’ve chosen an hour late in the evening. Why not a hour or two in the middle of the day (as in Surrenden for example)? That way we can cut out the hundreds of commuters who use Hollingdean each day too.
All this would achieve is the same areas that are struggling now, filling up each morning with daily parkers. It would leave residents in exactly the same position they are in now: traffic, congestion, and an inability to park near their homes.
The residents aren’t happy that their streets are being used as a carpark. The nearby workers need banishing too and, frankly, it’s not the local residents’ responsibility to provide parking for local workers.
I see a lot of comments here about the depot workers. I’m old enough to remember what Hollingdean was like before the depots were introduced, and remember the conversations that took place then.
The site the depots sit on used to be vehicle storage, mainly for London Road market traders. When the depot was built, those traders no longer had anywhere to store their vehicles and as a result, we still see a lot of them parked around Hollingdean where they can find parking to this day. The introduction of the depots here in Hollingdean removed that facility from the local residents.
Now, let me share an excerpt from the planning conditions that were stipulated at the time:
“there must be no unacceptable adverse impacts upon existing highway conditions in terms of traffic, congestion and parking”
I think we can all agree that having hundreds of depot workers parking on the streets of Hollingdean directly contradicts that condition.
It wasn’t always this way though. When the depot(s) first opened, workers parked in the large areas you see outside the buildings – quite literally a staff carpark. However, that has changed – that area is now used for charging lorries, and the worker’s vehicles have all been turfed out onto the local streets (apart from a few bigger-wigs who still get to bring their shiny BMWs into the compound).
So: not only has the introduction of the depots removed the facility of works vehicle storage from Brighton residents, and then removed local parking by displacing them, they have then gone another step further and now use all of the local streets for free parking for their workers.
It has not – and has never been – the responsibility of the Hollingdean residents and community to facilitate depot workers parking. It’s literally written into the depot contracts that they don’t, and yet here we are.
Let’s not forget that although they are running council services, both depots are owned and operated by private, for-profit, third party companies. They quite literally have taken from the local residents – multiple times – in order to generate private profits.
The mass number of non-resident, council-worker, vehicles that arrive in Hollingdean each day make up a decent chunk of the issues our residents face. Others will have you believe that it’s the students or people from adjoining zones that use Hollingdean for free parking that cause all our issues. Certainly, them too, but the council workers are a significant part of the problem too. They need to be removed from our streets (and preferably back into the depot as per the promises they made when it was agreed that the depots could be sited here) just as much as the others do.
As a final point: in the last proposed design for a parking scheme in Hollingdean, you will see that they included a vast number of max-stay-12-hour bays, all along Upper Hollingdean Road, right next to the depots. Those were there for the very workers we’re discussing now.
The whole of Brighton has become a joke, they just keep pushing the problem further and further out. I live in Carden Hill, its not become a dumping ground for vans and unwanted vehicles. The only way to fix this is to bring some kind of restriction in everywhere. It’s becoming a joke!
What about the rest of us who voted for a scheme in Hollingdean but had it cancelled arbitrarily when for some inexplicable reason the parking team decided to re-consult with other roads who voted against because it would impact them to implement the scheme only one certain roads? Why were we not consulted about other nearby schemes which have impacted us? Why did the council consult with the large number of roads where they have drives or car parks for the flats? Of course they won’t want a scheme.
They don’t have to spend hours trying to find a space every evening. My road is already bordered by a different scheme. If there is a scheme in South Hollingdean and we don’t get one it will be even worse.