Parking nightmare.

How many people have a garage but never use it?

Maggiemaybe
How is that? Something I've not heard of before.

How many people have a garage but never use it?
Well, ours is used but not for parking cars

I do GG but nor do I park on the street.

Sometimes the planners will ask for a carport to be provided rather than a garage on the basis that people put other stuff in garages, leaving the car outside, but tend not to put other stuff in a carport because it doesn't have a door. Carports can be designed with a lockable store at the back.

It’s an unadopted street, Gabriella, there are lots of them still in our area. When we moved in back in the Dark Ages we paid lower rates to compensate for the fact that we are responsible for our own repairs, etc, but when Council Tax was introduced we lost that slight advantage.

When we lived in an end terrace house in Holyhead we had no issues with parking outside the house at all. After my husband died and my daughter and I moved to Dover we bought a next to end terrace home in a quiet street. The day after we moved in my daughter came in with a scribbled note she had found on her car. It was full of swear words and ranted on about how we had parked in 'his' parking space. We later found out it was the boyfriend of a neighbour two doors down the street. They both had cars and he had become used to parking his outside our house. It was a race to see who was home first, if it was my daughter then she found another note on her car the following morning. When she married and moved home my ex son in law had bought a house with only on street parking and even worse it was at the top end of no through road with no turning space. Again it was a battle to find a parking place and, when my daughter was allowed to have a disabled parking bay marked outside their house the two neighbours across from her made her life a misery by reporting her every move and claiming she wasn't disabled at all. When my daughter and I moved here to Shropshire our priority was to find a house with a driveway, which we now have. So nice not to have to fight with neighbours about parking, I use to dread getting a phone call from my daughter when she was upset about her neighbours attitude towards her.

Don't get me started on parking! Our previously lovely residential area is plagued by HMOs (houses of multiple occupancy) full of students, most of whom seem to have a car. To make it worse, staff and students park in residential streets for the day because the university car parks are expensive and inadequate. Some residential roads are virtually one way which means cars pull over on to the verges to let vehicles pass, some of which are deeply rutted and full of water with very little grass. There is also permanent student parking on the verges even though many of the front gardens are now gravelled for parking. Owner occupiers are not happy.

The new housing estate in my area has 3/4/5 bedrooms. I would, therefore, expect there should be parking for at least 3 cars. Not so! As soon as people moved in cars were being parked half on, half off the new pavements as the driveways have room for one car in front of a garage. So much for needed new housing!

We have a very wide pavement just round the corner, and people park cars there - with all four tyres firmly on the pavement. Sometimes kindly leaving space at one side or the other, sometimes bang in the middle so a pram or wheelchair couldn't get past. The day I helped a fellow nan by holding her pushchair up roadside while she wheeled the other two wheels on the tiny scrap of free pavement was the day I rang our Council to complain. Not illegal, they said, except in London. It is illegal to drive on the pavement, but how would we catch them? I gave them the precise times of day when this particular car was driven on and off the pavement. That was two years ago, and it's still parked there every day. With three others ahead of it now, including the one that's parked at the bus stop.

Parking on pavement, even if only two wheels, is an offence if it causes pedestrians to walk in the road. Worth taking a photo of habitual offenders and emailing to the relevant enforcement authority. Wheelchairs, shaky walkers, buggy pushers, adults with small children should not have to step into the road past parked vehicles.

No parking problems for us, it’s very quiet here and lots of parking space available, more than is needed.
One of the things we look for when buying a house.I also wanted a flat driveway this time, as our last one was steep.
I sometimes wonder how people manage if they come home to find no place to park the car!

Oh, that it were so simple, winterwhite. Local authorities have been given the job of policing parking issues, and they can only charge with obstruction in specific circumstances. I have reported the issue to the council, as I have already said, and sent photos of the offending cars (as have others that I know of). Apparently they would act if the car parked at the bus stop was on the road, but not as it's on the pavement. Here's one online report of many about the problem. I've chosen this because it shows a full row of about a dozen cars all parked along a pavement in Middlesbrough.
www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/drivers-could-soon-fined-parking-10129882

I carry polite but pointed notes in my car and bag and put them under the windscreen wipers of the offending cars.

I take photos of cars that block the high street, especially the 20 year old who parks his boyracer car actually on the pelican crossing 'because I'm only nipping in for fags'. I send the photos to the council but he is still doing it so I imagine they have done nothing. I could ring his mum but I doubt it would help.

The councils have laws unto themselves. It appears that if you drive across a pavement to access your property, you may be charged with damaging the utilities that lie beneath the surface, so they will get you to pay for a dropped kerb. But, if someone parks half on and half off the kerbside, no one cares a hoot.

Building homes without sufficient parking is madness!
Parking restrictions are being introduced in our area but this means that drivers just find somewhere else! Railway station car parks and town car parks can be very expensive and thus force drivers to use the local roads.

There are retirement apartments in the throes of construction not far away and when I queried the parking at the open day the company seemed oblivious that even older people drive and own cars!!!

I don't mind drivers parking outside my house as I'm lucky enough to have a drive. However should they park across my entrance I would have no hesitation on writing a little billet doux and stuffing it under their wiper!

Seems as though civil enforcement must vary. We don’t have it here so a policing issue and community police officers do sometimes respond. They advise against notes on windscreens! Obviously a tedious and time-consuming job for anyone, much better to have better driver education.

I live in a pretty crummy farm cottage but it has a huge amount of off road parking and it would be an absolute priority for any house I ever considered moving to.

We live on a busy main road, which has a bus stop and double yellows all along the opposite side. We have a drive which can take 3 cars although we only have one, unless we have visitors.

Our problem is the getting out and in, because across the road neighbours, two of whom have high works vehicles, park on our side, not over, but tight to the edges of our drive. Some people also park opposite the bus stop causing a bottleneck every time a bus stops. The situation is complicated by having a street light, tight against the fence/hedge at one side of our drive.

DH was a dab hand at manoeuvring out onto the road, with me standing across the road to signal when there was a gap in the traffic, but now he has had to give up his licence, it is down to me to try to judge if the road is clear in both directions, to swing out past the parked vans on a wing and a prayer. If we need to be out early in the morning, I leave the car parked across the driveway overnight and sometimes have to leave it there coming home and go out late at night, when the traffic is less to get it back in. We have already lost two wing mirrors.

How many people have a garage but never use it?

I would love to have a garage GabriellaG . It’s one of the few things I miss from my last house . I live in a terraced house now, sadly no garages or drives .

Our garage was built in the 'olden' days when cars were smaller! I only have what is considered a small car now and I could drive it into the garage but wouldn't be able to get out of the car!!!! And needless to say it's become a junk - sorry, storage - area!!!!

It didn't used to be a problem. I have my own drive but now cannot always actually turn into it as the road is very narrow and new neighbours directly opposite park 2 or 3 large cars half on the road, half on the pavement, so that I cannot do a right turn onto my drive. No response to pointing this out to them!

We have a lovely big garage for the cars and a nice long drive. When the drive is blocked by rude cars I get so angry, a nightmare I do not need.

We have four new townhouses at the top of our street, goldengirl, all built within the last ten years with integral garages that are too small for any size of car. Consequently they’re all used for storage and the cars are parked on the street.

Same here Goldengirl older houses had much smaller garages, so we don’t use ours at all, but DH finds it a useful space to store all the logs for the fire, all his useful bits and bobs ( junk ) and what seems to be a whole shedload of assorted wood from small bits to eight feet long planks.