Chris Upton: Bumper to bumper - and that's just the parking
Dec 31 2008 By Chris Upton
Ask most people what they consider the trickiest part of driving a car and they will reply: parking it.
That would certainly be my confession, and it is therefore with delight I watch anyone else struggling to shoe-horn their vehicle into a space on Kings Heath High Street. As the traffic piles up behind, the windows mist up as the driver hyper-ventilates, randomly curses whoever is in the passenger seat and wishes he or she had come on the bus. There but for the grace of God...
But if depositing the car within walking distance of the kerb is a challenge, another is finding a space anywhere near the house. I can go days, sometimes nearer a week, without being able to park outside our humble abode.
Sometimes I happen to notice when Car A drives off and leaves the much coveted space outside our front window. Frantically I search for the keys, sprint up the road, wrestle with the steering-lock, spin round the block and by this time Car B will have kidnapped the spot. Worse still, the space I vacated will also now have gone and I have made a net loss of 30 yards on the whole deal.
The terraced road – what they used to call “bye-law housing” – was not designed with the car owner in mind. At the time these houses were constructed not even Herbert Austin had a car, and the internal combustion engine was no more than the hay inside a horse. At least our road is wide enough for two vehicles to pass – as long as one isn’t a 4x4, which half of them are. There are plenty of roads in Kings Heath and Sparkbrook where even this is not possible.
It is pointless railing at the 21st Century or at Mr Benz. This would be as hypocritical as James Watt’s son blocking the line of the railway through Aston Park because he didn’t want to see steam engines from his window.
I can instead direct my ire towards those who convinced the council to paint disabled parking bays on our street. In two of these cases the house-owner has added to the re-design by dropping the pavement, demolishing the garden wall and parking in front of the bay-window.
One of these spaces is indeed outside the house of a elderly lady. Although she is not herself a driver, an ambulance comes and collects her every day to go to hospital. The ambulance, however, has to park in the middle of the road, because a 4x4 has been parking over part of the disabled bay for three months.
As for the other two disabled bays, the recipient of the one died some ten years ago, and unless the other family have someone chained up in the attic, there is no one with a disability there either. Here, too, owner parks where the front garden had once bloomed. Parking off-road, of course, lowers his insurance.
In a fit of pique I once parked in this space overnight and someone left a note, accusing me of being anti-social. I was tempted to eat the message there and then, but there was no-one in the house to see my act of defiance. Except possibly the person in the attic.
* Dr Chris Upton is parking on the roof at Newman University College in Birmingham.
