Lewisham Council has announced plans to bring in parking charges for motorcycles. We (MAG and Save London Motorcycling) are going to do everything we can to fight these proposals, but we need your help.
If you are responding here are some points you may wish to make:
The charges are too high and will price many motorcyclists out of working in the borough
The fact that there is no daily pass will make commuting impossible for many who work in the borough
The lack of daily pass also means you can’t visit the borough as a one-off visit
Motorcycles take up far less space when parked and this is not reflected in the charges
Motorcycles are part of the solution to climate change, air quality and congestion
The charges are not proportionate based on the impact of motorcycles on climate change and air quality
Also in the section on Equality Impact in the survey you might want to mention that this impacts riders which mobility issues who may not be able to use public transport but are perfectly well able to ride.
We may not be able to prevent this entirely, but if we can at least get the charges reduced significantly that will be better than nothing.
I’ve only had a chance to flick through it, but they do seem to be proposing that daily/weekly visitor permits be made available. Page 22 of the council document:
Ah ha - that’s a change to the original proposal then - well spotted!
It’s not clear who can get the vouchers though. If they are visitor pernits it may mean a resident has to but the vouchers. The whole thing is a nightmare
Our emissions are a tiny percentage of emissions overall - and there has been work that shows a small modal shift from cars to bikes has a big impact on congestion and therefore on emissions. It’s all very short sighted AFAIAC
i played the electric bike emissions card … how good is the cobalt mining for the environment … have they considered the 30 year picture ? but tbh i would fly park the bike anyway !
There are two different environmental issues, and local councils are not so concerned with the greenhouse gasses one (yay diesel!) as they are with the local air quality one (boo diesel!). Because that is the one which applies locally and that they can do something about So to them some emissions is worse than no emissions, regardless of anything else. Those other issues are for national governments.
That said, relatively little cobalt is used in petrol refining, and most of it is recoverable and reused. But oil extraction and refining is hardly something which puts cobalt mining to shame. Notwithstanding lithium mining, alternative lithium battery technologies that do not use cobalt are already being tested, so I would not expect cobalt to be used much longer.
Not that there are not any cobalt mines in Lewisham for residents to put that ahead of the air they breath.
When I lived in Chelsea bike parking was free in any residents bay or bike bay. Then RBKC decided to bring in charges but as a ‘softener’ they left just a few bike bays free of charge, but converted the rest to ‘permit (££) required’ and also fitted ground anchors (the small circular ones that fold down). There were a lot of objections but they got their way.
So then it was a battle to find a space in the free bays because almost no one bought permits, the permit bays remained nearly empty. After a couple of years RKBC relented and made the bike bays permit free of charge (you still needed one to park).
And that’s how we found out the ground anchors were an absolute pain in the arse. If you reversed into them it would tend to tip you off the bike. Plus bikers would leave their chains locked into them which made it awkward to park and fit your own.
Those Lewisham charges are ludicrous.
Some years ago I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the proportion of motorcycles on UK roads and I think it came out to about 1% of the total vehicular traffic. In terms of physical size you can fit roughly 5 bikes into the space of 1 car. In terms of engine capacity I think it worked at about a quarter of the capacity of a car on average. Statistics aren’t my best subject so if anyone wants to do it more accurately…
Having reread the documents I think that visitor permits are for residents to buy for their visitors. Individuals would not be able to buy them. I might be wrong and therefore pleasantly surprised, but they seem to map to the visitor permits residents can buy for visitors to their home. We’re meeting Lewisham tomorrow so I’ll know more then and will try to remember to report back!