From the District Council website:
Rochford District Council will be closing Hockley Woods Car Park for essential maintenance work.
The car park will be closed from 7pm Sunday 16 September 2012 for approximately five weeks for resurfacing work.
During the works, there will be no access for any vehicles belonging to the general public. Please note that pedestrian access is unaffected by the closure.
The District council are also planning later on to charge for parking in the Hockley Woods car park on weekdays. If you have any comments the council ask you to ‘please contact the Head of Legal, Estates and Member Services in writing no later than the 28th September 2012.’
The council’s reasons?
The Council considered it necessary to introduce a charging tariff into Hockley Woods Car Park to control those using the facility for commuter and business purposes which were not associated with the use of the amenity. The charges are considered to be minimal and should not dissuade users of the woods. There are no charges at the weekends.
The introduction of enforcement measures are considered to be necessary to discourage long term commuter and business parking which causes inconvenience for members of the public visiting and using the woods on a recreational basis.
Having had a brief read through the draft of the parking order, I have a few questions:
1) Article 3 and the accompanying schedule are unclear. Is the Council really proposing to ban van drivers from parking there?
If so, is this:
* Every day
* Only weekdays
* Only weekdays between 9am and 6pm.
Or are cars banned from parking there outside of the hours that parking is to be charged for (the schedule only states that cars are allowed to park during the whole nine hour period the scheme is in operation) and Article 3 reads “The area of land edged red on the attached plan may be used, subject to the following provisions of this Order, as a parking place for such classes of vehicles, in such positions on such days and during such hours as are specified in relation to that area in the Schedule.” There is no permission for any vehicle or restriction on any vehicle outside of these hours.
2)Is the ice cream van going to be banned from parking in the car park?
3) Surely it would be better if section 9 which currently reads:
were to read
otherwise you will annoy the law-abiding with your Penalty Charge Notices when people have paid for their parking tickets but your equipment is not working correctly.
So I guess we’ll have to pay when we take the kids during school holidays. If you want to deter commuters, you could charge for just a short period, say 9-10am when commuters are at work, and patrol/fine in that period only.
What businesses are using the carpark, and what for? What commuters use it, I thought the station was a long way away?
Any chance of some authorised cycle tracks through the woods?
I would suggest that if you can’t afford 40-60p then going to the woods might be the very least of your problems…
What businesses are using the car park, and what for? – I thought a local business based a couple of hundred yards away, park in the woods car park all day, a friend told me he was coming back to his car after walking round the woods and saw several people in suits walking into the entrance of the woods car park from the Main Road and then they got in their cars and drove away.
However, if the idea is to stop people parking all day, why have an all day option to pay £3.00?
As ST1 said the charge could be 20p if you park between say 11-12 during the day
It could be people walking to the Station, as it is about 2/3rds of a mile and it would save quite a bit of money over a year if you park for free. I don’t know if the roads on the Betts Farm Estate stop all day parking, as they are just as close to the Station?
It’s not the cost so much, it’s the introduction of charging in the first place. Once in place these charges have a habit of increasing to provide a ready source of funding, and may possibly spread to other recreation facilities.
And as it happens, parking charges can be a pain in the backside when your change is swiped for school dinners and you haven’t signed up to the mobile phone payment scheme. I assume the newly installed parking machine will be incapable of giving change, a facility that food and drink vending machines have managed for decades.
Still totally against these charges. Yes have the 10 – 11 fee to stop station users but the woods are for all to enjoy and should be free for users. Whether people can afford it or not.
I have a feeling that people working at Seetec were parking their cars there during the day.