City-wide parking permits suggested for Brighton

All of Brighton and Hove's streets could eventually need parking permits

Piecemeal parking zones in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, could be scrapped in favour of a city-wide requirement for permits.

Conservative councillor Samer Bagaeen made the suggestion at the council's transport and sustainability committee on 26 March.

Opposition leader Green councillor Steve Davis said drivers were parking ever closer to the edges of Brighton and Hove with the creation of each new parking zone.

Labour councillor Trevor Muten, who chairs the committee, said his party was carrying out a review of parking across the city.

Mr Bagaeen said the current incremental approach to parking zones had not worked because it just “pushes the problem along”.

He said: “We’ve seen that at Surrenden and at the top of Dyke Road, in Wayland Avenue, which we said, when it came to committee, would move the parking problem to Westdene.

“May I suggest parking permits across the whole city up to the boundary.”

Mr Davis said the outskirts of the city were not a “parking utopia” because the roads were becoming swamped with displaced vehicles.

He said: “We recently had a parking zone in Surrenden, and now the residents of Patcham, in particular, Withdean Court Avenue and the Cedars, are struggling."

Some councillors say parking permits simply displace the problem to streets where permits are not needed

Mr Muten said: “We’ve picked this up as a new administration and we’ve worked out that the strategy, if there was one for parking, hasn’t worked very well for the city.

“We have problems in so many different places. We’ve got people paying very high parking fees which are probably unsustainable.”

He agreed when a new zone was created many drivers parked in nearby non-permit areas for weeks at a time.

Brighton and Hove’s parking problems could not be solved by adding more parking zones “patched on to the end” of existing ones, he said.

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