Unlike parking on yellow lines or overstaying in parking bays – which are now civil offences – parking on the pavement is still actually illegal.

Not only this, it is downright antisocial – the weight puts extra strain on pavement masonry which is designed to carry pedestrians, not cars, invariably a car parked on the pavement forces people with pushchairs or those in wheelchairs to step into the oncoming traffic on the road to get around the car, an in the very worst instances – such as the one pictured here – completely obstruct the paths of blind people, and worst of all here, even obstructing the blind pedestrian from being able to cross a junction in safety because the car is parked on the tactile paving which the blind use to tell they are at a junction.

In busy residential streets, built before the mass ownership of cars and therefore too narrow to safely take legal parking on both sides of the road, this is bad enough, but it’s often accepted by many that a certain level of give and take is needed, so long as the driver still parks with due consideration for pedestrians of all mobility abilities. I’m not going to claim to be innocent of ever having put my wheels on the kerb’s edge in such situations.

However this road is not a street with people living there parking on it – it’s an access road to the blocks of flats either side, to the canal below, and to the footbridge to the other side of the canal. Until recently, parking was not permitted at all, as it was a private access road patrolled by clampers; nobody living there parks there, because everybody who does live there has their own parking spaces. Since the road ceased to be private and the clampers moved out, it has become a magnet for drivers all over the city who are too tight-wadded to pay for their parking like everybody else has to. They have a legal right to park there – for the time being – but no moral right, and certainly they have no right to park in an illegal and antisocial manner obstructing the way for residents and transiting pedestrians alike.

So I wonder if the radio station BRMB approves of its staff parking their cars – with the company logo plastered all over it – in such a way?

“Motorists will be offered subsidies of up to £5,000 to encourage them to buy electric or plug-in hybrid cars under plans announced by the government. It is part of the government’s £250m plan to promote low carbon transport over the next five years”.

Sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it? I have to admit, for years I myself was a bit of a supporter of fully electric cars as a green solution to the problem of urban transport – even allowing for the flaw in the solution of it moving the pollution from the city streets to where the power stations are.

However, I heard the other day somebody express a much more significant flaw with electric cars.

Most people live in towns and cities.

Most people don’t have garages connected to their houses.

Many people are often lucky if they can park their car in their own street, let alone directly outside their own house.

Where will most people plug their electric cars in to recharge overnight?

In short, that’s £250m which would be far better spent elsewhere.

“Hundreds of homeowners deterred from having dropped kerbs fitted outside their homes because of the sky-high council cost have been thrown a lifeline” – what’s happenning is the council’s monopoly on doing the work is going to be ended, and people will be able to choose from a list of 11 preferred contractors to do the work, which should theoretically push prices down.

That the cost of having your kerb dropped so you can park your car in your drive rather than on the street is being lowered is a good start, but actually, why should you have to personally pay anything at all?

The council built the road – and consequently the pavement – initially, so why didn’t they build it with dropped kerbs outside houses? It’s a bit of a racket when you think about it, charging you to do something extra which should have been done in the first place! Considerations about car pollution aside, I’d say in the Modern Era it’s a perfectly reasonable expectation for people to have that if they have cars, and space on their front to keep one, that the pavement is constructed so as to enable them to park their car on their drive.

There’s also the fact that a dropped kerb is more than something solely of benefit to the householder, it also acts to the common good – for every car parked on a drive is a car not parked on the street (or worse still, not parked half on the pavement), meaning there is more space on the street for the traffic, which includes cyclists, to flow freely. And since the dropped kerb is owned by the council rather than by the homeowner, it seems doubly unfair for the homeowner to have to pay for it – after all, it’s hardly going to add value to the house, is it?