Letters from a new resident and a resident of over 30 years

Parking

We moved here recently from Fulham and, having read something of the arguments being deployed about the need or otherwise for a parking scheme for Wimbledon Park, think it would be helpful if residents understood the scale of the problem rolling towards them.

For more than thirty years, attempts have been made to limit commuter parking in central London. The first try employed parking meters, which were initially used in Mayfair and then spread rapidly outwards. However parking meters proved less than satisfactory since they targeted the resident as well as the commuter. So, today, parking meters have been replaced by controlled parking, residents' bays and ticket machines.

This revised system is spreading rapidly outwards. We were resident in Fulham when Kensington and Chelsea introduced the scheme and it now applies there throughout the week. Commuters, and others heading for Earls Court exhibitions or Knightsbridge shopping, or even further in, were displaced into Fulham.

Fulham responded by introducing the system for the streets close to Earls Court, Chelsea football ground, West Kensington and Barons Court Underground stations. We were outside that zone, but adjacent to it and the displaced commuters simply moved in and took over. It was a nightmare and in response Hammersmith and Fulham began to introduce controlled parking zones on a rolling programme.

This program is now well advanced and has reached the Hammersmith / Acton and Hammersmith / Chiswick boundaries where displaced commuters, who drive down the M4 / A4 looking for a parking place, are now causing problems in Chiswick. It will not been long before the zones reach the north bank of the river.

We in Wimbledon Park need to recognise that as the programme continues and the A3 commuter is squeezed out north of the river he ( or she ) is more likely to leave the A3 at the top of Putney Hill and find somewhere safe to park, somewhere convenient for the District Line. Dare one say the Grid?

Indeed on those occasions when we have arrived in London on the A3 in the morning rush hour we have found ourselves part of a continuous stream of traffic moving down Augustus Road, into Replingham Road and then filtering into the grid at the Southfields end.

Doing nothing is not an option for the future because the drive to exclude the car commuter from Inner London is accelerating and it will take little additional pressure on parking space to make the problems at Wimbledon Park similar to those at the Southfields end.

Certainly the parking situation at Wimbledon Park is as good now as it is ever going to be and something needs to be in place before what is now only a trickle of displaced cars becomes a flood. Things can only get worse.

David Sizer  Stroud Road.