This a follow-up to last week’s piece about parking.

On one of my little lunchtime walks I took a short cut through a council estate off Bayliss Rd in Lambeth. I had been past dozens of times, but had never actually been in it.

As you can imagine, parking spaces are a valuable commodity in central London, so in this estate they are all allocated to specific flats and marked accordingly. To deter commuters and other outsiders from parking there they have loads of warning signs about clampers and also those lockable posts in the middle of most spaces – not that they do a lot of good normally, and most of them are left down anyway, unless they are broken.

The lockable posts are old hat. I can remember them from the estate where my Granddad lived in very late 60s, although they were not really necessary then as it was unusual for a household to have more than one car and many didn’t even have one.

What really caught my eye was that there were solid fixed posts at the edges of the parking spaces. As soon as I saw then I thought “what a good idea!” At a stroke it prevents anyone from parking ‘on the line’ to occupy two spaces, and if the lockable posts are being used it also prevents anyone in a small car from going round them to steal a space – I have seen people do that to my company’s reserved spaces!

I doubt if it is feasible to do the same sort of thing in general purpose multi-storey car parks or large supermarket car parks because of the cost, but it must be worth considering for new build housing where the available parking is calculated precisely and often consists of small driveways or strictly allocated spaces, plus a few shared spare slots for guests. On those developments, losing just one space due to crap parking can be significant.

But… its not foolproof, as this fool proves. If you are crap enough at parking you can still inconvenience your neighbours!