The meeting last Tuesday evening arranged by the Alexandra Ward councillors to discuss the abandoned extension of the Alexandra Park Station area CPZ attracted enough people to fill a large conference table fairly tightly. Two officers who deal with traffic and parking, and the Council cabinet member for environment were there as well. The officers explained the background to the scheme which was recently cancelled. The result of the public consultation on extension of the existing CPZ area was negative by about 2 to 1, but while this meant that the idea of a scheme covering the area consulted was rejected, the Council recognised that a lot of people just outside the existing CPZ had severe parking problems. A number of these badly affected residents had been making representations to the Council for some time, and working with officers on potential solutions. The council therefore tried to develop a less extensive scheme to alleviate the difficulties where they were most serious.
The decision to abandon the extension was therefore not actually overturning the result of a consultation, but withdrawal of an effort to find an alternative, which might get local support, to try to improve parking for the worst affected areas. On what basis exactly the decision to withdraw the scheme was reached remains unclear (at least to me).
The officers and councillors present acknowledged that there had been mistakes in the handling of the whole CPZ implementation, and that communication of the results of the consultation, and notification of the withdrawal of the scheme after many people had bought permits, had been inadequate.
The conclusion of the meeting was that the Council will now do a parking survey in the area to try to establish who is parking and when, and hope to have results by mid-October, when another meeting with residents will be held.
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As I understand it - and I hope someone will correct this if I'm wrong - the first consultation about extending the CPZ covered an area from the station well over towards Albert Road Rec and that was majority against. The Council then took a part of that area where there had been a majority in favour, and proposed that as a more limited extension, and this is what has now been cancelled.
A little while ago I thought I found something on the Council website reporting that at the original consultation stage they already had the idea of defining only parts of some streets as CPZ, which presumably would allow them to propose the scheme we thought was being implemented, but I can't find that now.
The letter cancelling it says " the majority of residents in the proposed area supported the extension of this CPZ when consulted". I think this refers to the area the Council had picked out precisely because it had a majority in favour of the CPZ, but then they said "it would appear that now at the implementation stage, the level of support has diminished" - again meaning just within that smaller area. How the apparently diminished support led to cancellation didn't really become clear at the meeting.
It's all a bit of a labyrinth.
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