Appeal 3362547

The appeal is dismissed.

The main issue in the appeal is the effect of the proposal on pedestrian safety and amenity.

The appeal site is a two storey mid-terrace dwelling on the south east side of [address] not too far from the town centre of Woking.

[address] in the immediate vicinity of the appeal site is a one way street for vehicular movement and has public footways on both sides of the road. The public footways are not very wide and I note the appellant describes the width of the footways as “paltry”. It has on-street parking which is generally available where there are no dropped kerbs facilitating on-site residential parking.

The proposal is to install a dropped kerb to the public road/footway so that a vehicle can park on the hardstanding in front of the bay window at no.131.

Table 3 of the Woking Borough Council LDD Parking Standards Supplementary Planning Document (April 2018) relates to parking at dwellings and states that, as a minimum, it is expected that parking spaces will measure 2.4m by 4.8m and that this is necessary to accommodate the nature and size of modern cars. I agree that a 4.8m deep parking space is necessary in front of no.[address] in order to avoid the situation where a vehicle would overhang the forecourt space and encroach into the public footpath on the south-east side of [address]. The Appellant does not dispute that the available space is less than 4.8m in depth.

My site visit confirmed that the available depth would be likely to be too short to park a standard modern vehicle in front of the dwelling without impeding the footway. I noted on my visit that there were a number of vehicles parked on-site in front of dwellings which encroached onto the footway space. The fact that this encroachment and partial obstruction already occurs is not a good reason for endorsing further future encroachments of a similar nature.

I consider it highly likely that permission for on-site parking on the appeal site would be detrimental to pedestrian safety by causing people on foot, with pushchairs or in wheelchairs to move into the carriageway or to have to stop to let a contra-flow of footway users through the gap. This would either endanger those users causing conflict with vehicular traffic or inconvenience them.

The SPD I have referred to above should not be applied with absolute rigidity and the appellant has referred to several matters which he considers may avoid undue harm to pedestrian safety in this case. Amongst those is that traffic movements to and from this single family dwelling would reasonably be expected to be infrequent, at slow speed and of short duration and that, for a driver exiting the site, visibility would be good in both directions. I do not agree that vehicle movements to and from the appeal site would necessarily be infrequent or that driver visibility from the site would be good when reversing onto [address]. I consider that there would be a real risk of harm to pedestrians if there was a dropped kerb and parking space in this location.

Given that there is some front hardstanding perpendicular parking in front of terraced dwellings on [address], the appellant has examined accident records relating to [address] and cannot find any incidents involving manoeuvres to and from vehicle crossovers. Neither the historic time period examined, the sources analysed nor any written data is produced as part of the appeal documentation and as a result I cannot attach anything other than limited weight to this consideration. Even if I could, I have examined the particular and individual merits of this appeal proposal ,which is highly likely to lead to vehicles physically encroaching into the footway space, and I find that harm would be likely to result.

The appellant refers to the possibility of vehicles which do overhang a public footway being enforced against through such actions as fixed penalty notices but this does not in my view provide a cogent reason for potentially permitting such encroachment to occur and cause harm. I note the appellant’s survey to observe and note whether existing vehicular accesses resulted in vehicle overhang and its results being negative, however, even though my site visit was of shorter duration than the survey, I noted vehicle overhangs (in contrast to the appellant’s survey observations).

In relation to this particular appeal the Council is concerned that planning permission for a dropped kerb would lead to difficulty in refusing similar future applications in the area and the result would be a net reduction of on-street parking spaces on [address]. I agree with the Council in this respect because allowing a sub-standard space, (as this would be in terms of depth), would make it difficult to resist other sub-standard spaces. Maintaining the availability of on-street parking is important and a sustained loss of on-street parking on [address] would lead to general inconvenience and undesirable results for the parking regime in this part of Woking.

I therefore conclude that the proposal would unduly harm pedestrian safety and amenity and would be contrary to Woking Borough Council LDD Parking Standards Supplementary Planning Document (April 2018)

Having considered all representations made, for the reasons given above, I dismiss the appeal. [name].C.