Letter: School car parking

It was good to read earlier this week that Carfield primary school is trialling road closures for a week to drop off and pick up times, and closing nearby roads. It’s a scheme to make the roads safer and encourages walking and cycling and scooting.

They hope to learn enough to make the initiative work from September.

Councillor Paul Turpin said he was delighted that the school took Part. Coun Alexi Dimond thinks there has been a positive response.

As a child Coun Dimond suffered severe asthma and tells us that we must provide a healthy and safe environment.

Am I reading about a fairyland school, with cooing doves and a beautiful princess? What about all those other schools where it’s daily mayhem morning and mid afternoon?

In my area, if you have a 9am health appointment, you won’t get a bus between around 8.15am and 9am, because the roads are not wide enough for buses crossing each other with cars lined up along the roadside.

Sometimes, someone decides to park their car on the verge right against the perimeter of the school and about three yards from its gate. Everything stops. If you have a car and need to go out… you’re going nowhere.

It’s bad enough in the morning, but worse in the afternoon. You go out and there is no point coming home.

Driveways are blocked, and they aren’t going to move to let you back in, as one car leaves another arrives.

Sheffield Council laid down yellow no parking lines. That was back in 2016 and from day one, to now, they break the law every day. It was supposed to be ‘safety for the children’. So why didn’t the council enforce it?

In five years we have seen about three members of the council’s parking teams. The first was a male who got a load of abuse.

The second time it was female almost in tears from the abuse. She told us that this particular school was the worst school, and the parking team didn’t want to come because of the abuse.

The third one arrived about a year later in the morning and said that the parking department had altered their working times and now they finished at 3pm.

No wonder its mayhem, and it almost looks like they altered the end of their working day so that they weren’t available to go to schools.

There’s the drivers who drop their children off and want to do a three-point turn while all the other cars are trying to move. The second part of a three-point turn includes reversing. Reversing off the road and onto the pavement also includes almost hitting walls, fences, and gates belonging to the people who live there.

It’s similar to when there are a couple of cars six feet apart and a driver arrives looking for a parking space. Because they can’t get their car between them lengthwise, the driver drives between them and their front is on the pavement against the front of a resident’s property, and they squeeze between the two cars, and their car is sticking out between the two cars and on the road. It happens often!

It goes on, and on, and no one from the council does anything. In fact I believe it’s a police matter.

Coun Alexi may have had asthma when younger, but try having about 50 cars around a school in winter with engines running, and sometimes in summer too. It doesn’t matter if residents get chest infections, no one cares.

What about the kids who are going into the school or out, aren’t they breathing in the same pollution?

The idea of encouraging kids to be walking and cycling and scooting around my local school, is more likely to get one of them killed.

The biggest risk to kids is their parents. Sitting for half an hour to drop or collect child, merely gets a bigger number of cars parked and then, they are all trying to get away at once.

The school are also a big part of the problem, encouraging parents to hang around in the school grounds instead of leaving.

I voted Labour for over 50 years, but I quit them because of the mayhem, abuse, assaults, etc. caused by the school. I will never go back to them again.

Carfield School may be about a fairyland school, with cooing doves and a beautiful princess, but a recent similar story in The Star about a school complaining about dangerous parking at schools, brought an avalanche of complaints on Facebook by people fed up with the situation.

I can’t understand how you can get fined for stopping on a yellow line, but you can get away with it if you park around a school with lines.

Let’s just say that it seems residents are getting fed up of what goes on around some of our schools, and the failure of the city council to sort it out.