THE Scottish Government has introduced a Transport Bill which includes a ban on pavement parking. Edinburgh is going to ban street advertising boards.
The RNIB wants this ban to be extended to other councils ("Councils urged to ban street advertising boards", The Herald, November 24). They can of course easily, given the will. The Roads (Scotland) Act makes it an offence to place anything on a road, and this includes the pavement, without the roads authority's written consent.
However, that is all well and good if these things happen. There is still a giant and incredibly overlooked spoke in the wheel for pedestrians, handicapped or not – the multiplying problem of the wheelie bin.
I have never seen any article, news report, or letter indicating their malevolent effect on pedestrians whether handicapped, pushing a pram or just walking. How often do you see them brooding on a narrow pavement, demanding all of it, clustered together outside a tenement block presumably for protection from irritated passers-by and leaving little pedestrian space? And waiting patiently for their owners to take them home when they return from work, if as so often, they are not emptied till the householder has left.
The Environmental Protection Act 1990 makes a quite specific requirement that these containers should only be allowed on footways when the roads authority is satisfied they will not cause obstruction. In British Columbia it is an offence, with a high probability you will be caught, to obstruct the pavement, thus no pavement parking and rubbish containers go on the carriageway. In Northern Spain I think the same arrangement operates.
As an example, in my working days, I made specific arrangements to assist the blind at a site near tenements, by widening the pavement for a shorter crossing, installing a pelican crossing only for the situation being regularly unworkable for those I tried to help by the widened area being the" perfect" place for the bin men to quickly dump the many emptied bins, usually across the path to the crossing.
JA Taylor,
19 The Fieldings, Dunlop, Ayrshire.
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