The depths of Bexley council’s malevolency knows few boundaries and nothing revealed on this site so far quite matches what councillor Craske’s vultures have been up to in Blackfen. For a supremely wicked individual like Craske it is a temptation that cannot be resisted because the layout of the shops and Blackfen Road is such that trade cannot be conducted at all at some premises without minor transgressions of Craske’s petty rule-book. Add to that the fact that the council’s parking contractor is known to break government guidelines by setting ‘ticket targets’ and you have a recipe for widespread misery and the destruction of small businesses.
More Craske’s gestapo car trains its sights on motorists performing unavoidable manoeuvres.
SETyres is the principal target of Bexley’s malign intentions.
The parking problems are especially severe for motor repairers who have to accept cars into their premises. At SETyres it is essential that cars enter in a forward direction to allow access to their wheel alignment equipment and to avoid filling the building with exhaust fumes. Parking is not allowed outside their premises at any time during business hours, though you may be hard pressed to discover that as the only sign is far away (image below) but their forecourt is available for one car to queue outside each of their fitting bays. However that is the root of the problem. When a car has been attended to and ready to leave, the one behind must reverse into the road to allow it out. The road is close to a junction and to reverse completely into it might obstruct traffic while one car stands there and the other is given enough room to leave. That danger is minimised by not reversing too far into the road but even one wheel partially left on the dropped kerb for a second or two is interpreted by our senseless council as parking on the pavement.
More than 40 shops and no free parking spaces…
The section of road shown in the above includes more than 40 small businesses and there are just seven parking bays charged at 40 pence per half hour. There used to be a small free car park but Bexley council, forever intent on damaging businesses and shopping centres, sold it off for private use
…just seven bays costing 40 pence for half an hour, one of which is very often occupied by a gestapo wagon.
Only this single sign indicates the restricted parking times. There is no sign at the far end of the yellow line.
While awaiting your turn to enter private property you risk a ticket.
Advice from the police is that such a manoeuvre cannot be parking but unfortunately the police are no longer
in charge of parking regulation, a man obsessed with persecuting motorists is.
The council and its gestapo car is therefore on to a winner, it can sit there all day with its lens trained on
SETyres and pick off new victims at regular intervals. As little as two inches of wheel on the kerb edge for
20 seconds is enough to trigger a fine. In the course of 2010 alone nearly 1,400 of SETyres’s customers have been
caught in this almost perfect trap - and councillor Craske, the vindictive intellectual pygmy currently engaged
on a mission to hide certain financial chicanery from public view, cannot resist punishing as many Bexley residents
as he possibly can.
Allowing the previous customer out is tricky given how busy the road is but if this essential manoeuvre is carried out as safely as possible it will also result in a parking fine.
SETyres is a small chain of motor repairers who are suffering dreadfully at the hands of Bexley council and is currently engaged in legal action against it. Their respective legal teams met in the middle of November. The company has authorised me to report this harassment of businesses in Blackfen Road, visiting shoppers and abuse of power by Bexley council but it has not sought to influence it in any way. From my time spent in and around SETyre’s premises it seemed they were doing their utmost to provide a good service to their customers, but if you should be tempted to avail yourself of it, then please be careful; Bexley council will penalise any stopping while you traverse the entrance to SETyres and depending on traffic conditions that may be quite hard to do.
November 2010