Controlling Parking in Crawley

Like many Labour activists, most of my Saturday mornings are spent out speaking with local residents on their doorstep, listening to what issues matter to them and putting the case for voting Labour. This may well sound daunting, but many of the conversations are genuinely fascinating and the camaraderie amongst the canvassers is enough to get you through even the worst weather conditions.

One of the issues which comes up most is parking. This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, given that at the time planners started overseeing the construction of the New Town they assumed that one car space would be needed for every ten houses.

Clearly, we’re living in a very different world now, with multiple vehicles per household and large numbers of work vans. Adding to this pressure is the impact of rising housing prices resulting in a growing number of adults per property, both through adult children remaining at home for longer and greater numbers living in house-shares well into their 20s/30s. So, despite per capita car ownership actually seeing a sustained drop over recent decades in Crawley, overall there are more cars trying to fit on the same amount of road space.

Despite Highways being a West Sussex County Council responsibility, for several decades Crawley Borough Council tried to resolve the problem by spending tens of millions of pounds taking out verges to create more parking. Unfortunately, this too ran into a number of problems.

The first issue was that it didn’t actually do much to resolve the problem. Because vehicles have to be able to safely manoeuvre, the net gain in spaces tends to be low compared to the actual amount of space you have to remove to introduce those bays. As a result, residents are often left disappointed by the schemes and even where large schemes have been possible, within a year knocking doors in those roads residents were again raising parking problems, with the number of cars having increased as the number of bays were introduced.

Secondly, there’s the environmental impacts, including surface water run-off–with an increase in local flooding as water has fewer places to go and ultimately there’s a limit to how much water a gully can deal with at a time, impacts upon biodiversity stemming from reducing available areas of habitat, and the visual impact of removing all greenery from the town. When Crawley was built, they learned from the Garden City movement of including large areas of strategic green space in creating communities which would be pleasant to live in. We already have to sacrifice too much of this space in trying to meet our housing needs and turning the rest into parking just adds to the challenge.

However, the biggest issue by far was the cost. Grass verges are not simply mud and grass surrounded by kerbing, when housing is built the utilities are run through the grass verges and consequently removing them involves large amounts of relocating these utilities, before even beginning to produce an acceptable standard of new highway. The end result is that the cost per bay for each parking improvement scheme ranged from £10,000 to £30,000.

At the time when these schemes were running, Crawley had large capital reserves and consequently had the money available to finance even the least cost-effective proposals, but over the years we’ve had to spend much of our reserves into generating new forms of revenue to cover our day-to-day running costs in the face of the Government’s sustained cut in council funding. As a result, those reserves are no longer there.

When we closed the list for areas requesting parking improvement schemes there were around 200 roads on the list, a decade later that list would be far longer. If we were to deliver all 200 of those original roads that would come at a cost of up to £60m. Just to put that into context, Crawley Borough Council’s would need to cut its services down to the legal bare minimum and make its tax eight greater to finance these improvements. In practice, we would be committing the town’s residents to decades of debt and bind the council’s hands from delivering anything else.

In the long-term, I suspect that the introduction of self-driving vehicles will, in time, reduce the overall demand for car ownership. After all, the second most expensive thing most people buy is their vehicle for only around an hours’ worth of use per day, a figure which will continue to fall with greater levels of home working.

For now, however, we clearly have a problem. Six years ago, West Sussex County Council commissioned an audit of the use of road space in Crawley to assess what the demands were and how best to meet those needs. These audits, which cost tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayer money, were never published and were only released when I submitted a Freedom of Information request last year. Upon reading, it became clear why the council had quietly dropped them, they fell far short of their ambition, looking at a tiny amount of space in the town and coming to no useful conclusions.

Yet, WSCC remain responsible for doing what they can to resolve this issue and ultimately they do have options, the most significant one being the introduction of Controlled Parking Zones. These are not a complete solution by any means, the road space remains the same, but for areas where existing pressures are exacerbated by non-residents parking in the area, they do help.

There is clearly a demand for new schemes or expansions in Crawley on the edge of existing schemes, with the remaining section of the Three Bridges neighbourhood and Northgate both crying out for new roads to be added to the existing CPZs.

Unfortunately, WSCC seem generally reluctant to roll these out. The last CPZ extension I’m aware of is one I secured on a technicality back when I was a county councillor. Since then the view appears to be that Crawley has already had its fair share.

It’s hard to know why they take this view, Crawley has the highest density of housing in the county and despite taking up 2% of West Sussex’s landmass we account for around 40% of economic activity, consequently the demand for on-road parking will exceed that of other districts by a huge amount. It’s not as though they are even a big cost for the council, as the permits and fines are supposed to cover each scheme’s costs.

However, things may well be starting to change. I notice that WSCC’s budget has included a CPZ for Manor Royal in their proposals (something which needs to go hand-in-hand with protections for residents in Langley Green, Northgate and Three Bridges, to avoid large amounts of business-related parking relocating into neighbourhood areas) and there does seem to be a streamlining of the process of late to enable the community to trigger reviews where needed, something I will be looking to discuss with other councillors over the next few weeks to see where we can best work to get things moving. In the meantime, if anyone is interested in having a new CPZ/CPZ extension for their local area, do visit www.westsussex.gov.uk/roads-and-travel/parking/controlled-parking-zones-cpzs/ and have a read of the relevant policy document.