Dropped kerbs
It is an offence to park across a dropped kerb so that it obstructs the resident’s access to the public highway, preventing them from driving on or off their drive.
If you are considering building a driveway you will require a dropped kerb (there is a charge for this and you may need planning permission)
Driveway obstruction
If parked vehicles are blocking your driveway regularly, then you may want to apply for access markings at the entrance to your drive.
The road markings are in the form of an elongated 'H' placed across the width of the driveway, approximately one metre either side of the driveway. These markings are only advisory but are helpful in discouraging people from parking on your dropped kerb.
Once the markings are in place, if a vehicle parks across your dropped kerb and completely blocks access to your drive you can request for us to enforce your H bar marking. However, this is at our own discretion.
Please note that your own vehicle is liable to be charged with a penalty charge notice if you park across your own dropped kerb.
Parking opposite the driveway
Some residents are unable to access their driveway due to vehicles parked opposite the drive entrance. In these instances, we cannot introduce H bar markings or other measures to prevent this. Residents should look to resolve these issues amongst themselves and park in a considerate and safe manner.
We do not introduce parking restrictions to protect the visibility of residents’ driveways due to the limited number of vehicles accessing driveways on a daily basis.
You may wish to extend the width of your driveway to provide additional room to manoeuvre. However you must apply to extend your dropped kerb before commencing work to extend your driveway.
Parking to the side of the driveway
Unfortunately, we do not introduce parking restrictions to prevent visibility from residents’ driveways becoming obstructed.
We receive many requests from residents throughout the borough to introduce parking restrictions to allow them clear visibility when exiting their driveways. It is not appropriate to introduce parking restrictions to protect residents’ driveways due to the limited numbers of vehicles accessing driveways on a daily basis. When parking restrictions are introduced to protect visibility for road safety reasons these are only considered at road junctions which take much higher volumes of traffic than a private driveways.
We appreciate the difficulties you may be facing when exiting your driveway and your concerns about road safety however there is no justification for the introduction of parking restrictions.