“You can’t park on the pavement.”
That’s the new rule. Simple, right?
But here’s the problem:
You also can’t park anywhere else.
And if you try — if you use the only space your street has ever had — you’re fined. Or the space is removed entirely, replaced by double yellows the council calls “mitigation.”
That’s the trap.
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The Pavement Parking Ban punishes ordinary people who need accessibility with no alternatives, such as:
• Families with young kids
• Older residents who can’t walk far
• Households with no driveway or safe drop-off
The government is engaged in sloganism. “Pavements are for people,” we’re told — a space to be reclaimed from cars in the name of "accessibility."
But here’s the double standard:
The same councils enforcing this ideal routinely block pavements with bins, multiple times a week. On collection days, accessibility on some streets drops to zero. Prams, wheelchairs — even pedestrians — are pushed into the road to get around them.
In quiet streets, that might not matter. But once cars are fully on-road, that same space becomes dangerously squeezed with visibility reduced. It’s an accident waiting to happen.
Despite a legal duty to keep pavements clear — and all the talk of “people first” design — most Scottish councils require residents to leave bins at the kerbside. It's not just tolerated. It's mandated, because it works. So does pavement parking.
So what’s really going on here? A tidy theory about how streets should work, clashing with the messy truth of how they actually do.
Most of the horror stories used to justify this parking ban?
They weren’t about pavement parking — they were about obstruction, already illegal under existing laws.
But councils didn’t enforce those.
So instead of doing their jobs, they blamed everyone.
Now we’re left with a law that:
• Reduces accessibility on the very streets it claims to help
• Creates real and predictable risks to people and property
• Offers no nuance, no flexibility, and no alternatives
And the council just watches. Waits for poor, even dangerous outcomes to happen first, and then confirms that "mitigation" would take place. This is the removal of available parking through double yellow lines. As there are almost no exceptions allowed under the rules of the legislation. That’s both a dereliction of duty and a revealing position baked in. That when the legislation creates danger or reduces accessibility, the answer is not to revisit the legislation, but to force the removal of the car. That is the real agenda driving this legislation.
I live in East Dunbartonshire. Enforcement starts on 1st September —
But this issue matters across all of Scotland.
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