Recently I've been picking up concerns from residents about lack of parking in New Road. This road like a number of others in Redlands suffers from overspill parking from visitors to the Royal Berks Hospital and Reading University. Parking is currently unrestricted and acts as 'free parking', which is obviously highly unsatisfactory for people who live there.
I raised the issue with RBC last Summer and was told that New Road would be put on the list for the next round of minor traffic schemes (they are taken together annually to save the Council money - the public consultations for individual schemes are very expensive). The latest list (which included New Road) was approved last November.
It all seems to have gone a bit quiet since then. I have asked the highways department to update me asap about the state of play concerning a scheme for New Road, so we can get the parking problems sorted for local residents as soon as possible.
In the longer term, I would like to see RBC being much tougher on both the RBH and Reading University about problems of overspill parking. Both these organisations attract large numbers of car drivers which they cannot seem to accomodate within their own grounds and this is not sustainable both on environmental grounds, and in terms of the negative impact it has on local residents' quality of life.
Comments