High Street Parking and Related Issues

We are still living in difficult times as although some businesses are returning, things are from the way they were. Its good that there are now restaurants, pubs and local shops opening, many did a wonderful job through the crisis with take away meals and deliveries. As I was ill, I have not played much of a Chairman's role recently but the Society continues to work using electronic communication and we have given opinions and received opinions from members on a range of planning proposals. In fact a look at the Rother web site will show a number of developments some of which are rather controversial and are covered on this site. My thanks to Julian Luckett for his efforts on our behalf during 'lockdown'.

Another area of controversy remains that of parking provision and enforcement, we have provided East Sussex with our thoughts on CPE as reported in Rye News (see next article). CPE together with parking meters and bays etc will arrive we are told in September and we are pleased that we have managed to help reduce the required number of meters, though we still think that they are too big for our narrow pavements.

A proposal to part pedestrianise the High Street ran into serious opposition from traders in particular and has been dropped as an option by East Sussex, there is a clear divergence of opinion between what I could call the road lobby and the green lobby regarding the future of driving not just in Rye but everywhere. The Conservation Society leans toward a greener approach, without banning cars we would like to see fewer of them trying to park into every spare space without much thought of others and to have the limited road space more equally shared between cars, pedestrians and cyclists.

It would be good to have a members meeting concerning these issues to help the committee formulate policy, but we are unable to meet at the moment. In the meantime we would be interested to receive comments as to how members feel about the issues, some raised in our response below to the future of the High Street written by Allan Thomson. Please drop me an e.mail.