The Great Lap of London is back but this time the other way round!

Why?
1. It used to be free to park like that, now they expect us to pay and give us nothing for it, plus you need a mobile phone and credit card to pay.

2. On-street motorcycle parking in Westminster has increased by 35% since 2006 from 4,550 to 6,150 but they also stopped motorcycles from parking on unused pieces of land and footpaths/alleyways where the vehicle was not obstructing pedestrians

3. The Mayor of Paris INCREASED the number of FREE individual marked out motorcycle parking spaces by 18,000, to do this they had to remove 1200 money making car parking spaces

4. Westminster City Council promised secure ground anchors to chain our bikes to… so far they have only installed 140 in 20 bays, there are 500 bays which works out at around 4%

5. From FOI (Freedom Of Information) requests we have worked out that Westminster City Council has generated almost £4million in revenue in 2 years from this scheme

6. Westminster City Council claim to be making a loss of £430,000 a year, costing tax payers money for a scheme which is supposed to be revenue neutral as it is illegal to charge for parking in the sole purpose of generating revenue

7. If the scheme is LOSING MONEY what sense is there in continuing to charge?

8. They have received 8000 objections to this scheme, NO SUPPORT from any Residents’ Associations, and total damnation from the BMF, MAG, and Tax Payers Alliance

9. They now face a costly High Court case which has been funded by donations to the NoToBikeParkingTax Campaign which is costing the tax payer even more money

10. The leader (Danny Chalkly) in charge of the parking scheme recently resigned due to the constant pressure from this campaign and the lack of support from his colleagues

11. The Government gets £50billion in taxes (fuel (a litre of unleaded petrol at £119.9 per Litre = fuel duty at 57.19p, VAT 17.86p, Product 39.85p, per Litre, retailer and delivery 5p), insurance 5% of policy cost, road tax, licenses, speed camera fines) a year which is supposed to cover everything to do with the roads in Britain, they currently only spend £8.3billion of it… hence the state of our roads. Why do local councils need to charge for parking when the Government is sitting on £41.7billion, its time we asked for our money back!

12. Westminster City Council is one of the richest councils in England and gets an annual budget of £1billion, part of which is to cover all road maintenance (signs, road markings, pavements, etc) why then do they charge for painting a white line for motorcycles to park in? They don’t charge cyclists for all the cycle railings to chain their bikes to, and bicycles dont pay towards the up keep of Britains roads. (We are not making a stab at cyclists here, we are just making a point, we think cyclist should get free railings and parking facilities, but then how can the councils be so hypocritical and charge the tax payers even more for something they are already entitled to and have payed for!)

13. Westminster City Council makes £40million a year from council tax, but makes £80million from parking revenue, why does the price of parking a car keep exceeding the rate of inflation for no benefits? When parking meters were first introduced they started in Westminster 50 years ago, it cost back then 5p an hour to park, if the price had increased with inflation it would now only cost 45p an hour to park… but it now costs £5 an hour, which is a 10,000% increase… for what?

Motorcycle and scooter riders will not let this happen to them!

For further information visit No to Parking

This entry was posted by Metropolis on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Blog, General

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