The politics of parking..

top view photo of red and blue convertibles on asphalt road

Heading into the local elections in Northern Ireland, we’ll hear about health, the climate crisis, the housing crisis, anti-social behaviour, dereliction etc. We’ll hear very little about parking. But we should, because it affects all of us and contributes directly to those issues. The word “parking” has its roots in Washington DC. In 1871, the Washington Parking Commission was established – not to park cars as they didn’t exist then – but to to plant trees, bringing shade, birdsong and …

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With the opening of a new 575 space car park in Belfast City Centre can we remove 575 on street car parking spaces and replace them with bike lanes?

2020 has not been a good year for the McCausland family. Firstly they own Value Cabs, which has been hit hard by COVID, then they open up a new car park just as the city has record low levels of commuters. I am sure all of you working from home really miss having to pay £20 a day to park in Belfast. Still, they have been in business over 100 years so I imagine this too shall pass for them. …

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Parking tickets. Or here we go again.

Retail NI has issued their standard response to the news that 94,252 tickets were issued for unlawful on-street parking in 2017. Outrageous.  Over-zealous.  Clear and negative impact.  Neither sensible nor fair. They’ve said it all before.  Ten tickets “every single day” of 2016 on the Lisburn Road is apparently horrendously over-zealous.  It’s an unfair disparity. But Glyn doesn’t appear to understand something very very simple. Why would a road which is two miles long and is subject to Urban Clearway …

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Tall Ships 1991 – “great spectacularity” that could have turned M2 into a carpark #20YearRule

INTERVIEW WITH Sir Richard Needham about the Tall Ships which first visited Belfast back in July 1991. It was the first large-scale event expected to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors each day. Recently released government papers show that extra car parking spaces were needed, and there was a suggestion that the M2 could be used for parking.

Perspectives: parking tickets in Belfast

The Belfast Telegraph is creating a fuss about parking tickets on the Lisburn Road.  Fortunately, I happen to have the actual figures in front of me from a request I made last year… First, a little perspective.  The Lisburn Road is two miles long.  There is no comparison to a city centre street at a few hundred yards, and the Stranmillis Road is only 1.4 miles with the tickets probably only concentrated on a small section where congestion is worst …

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