Last week I was contacted by several residents and visitors to Crimdon reporting cars parked along the access road to the sea front from the junction on the A1086 Coast Road.
Regular readers of these pages will be aware that parking charges came into force last week after the coalition in control of Durham County Council thought it would be a good idea to make people pay to visit Crimdon. This was despite my objections when I spoke against the charges at a meeting of the Highways committee in county hall last year. Full details can be found in this link: Coalition to impose parking charges at Crimdon
The problem now for the council is that visitors to Crimdon are opting to avoid the charges by parking instead along the access road, and because the road doesn’t belong to the council there’s not much they can do about it. Unfortunately this is creating a problem for someone else, someone who didn’t have a problem until the coalition decided to impose parking charges along the sea front.
I’ve contacted senior officers at Durham County Council requesting a meeting with the relevant people to see what they’re going to do to put things right. In the meantime I’ve urged the council to suspend the parking charges with immediate effect until a solution is found to this problem. Whether they'll agree to do that is to be seen, but I think something needs to be done to address a problem that is only likely to get worse now that the lighter nights are here again.
I’ll update on progress as soon as I have more information.
