Disabled parking

There could be a whole other post about people who use disabled spaces but do not have a disabled badge, but that has been well covered elsewhere by a lot of people.

What I have been thinking about, however is the design of disabled spaces. These vary so much. Some are excellent - located at the right place, nice wide buffer zones either side (cross hatched out so no one parks on them) but others are abysmal. It turns out, that is pretty much the standard, as demonstrated by the very helpful factsheet on Hampshire County Council's website. The Scottish rules are the same, but don't have pictures. The cross-hatching on one side can be a problem for me, if its on the passenger side mostly because reversing into parking spaces has never been my strong point!

The most common annoyance is when the disabled space is merely a standard sized space with a sign. I'm not a wheelchair user, but I do have to swing my door wider than normal to get out, since I need to plant both feet on the ground together. This is not unusual and the benefit is to the car next to me as well as I don't accidentally dent it (FWIW this is also the reason parent & child places exist - it stops the parent denting the next car over while leaning in to fasten the child in).

More than once I've come back to one of these spaces to discover another driver has parked so close to the side of my car I can't get back in. A "normal" person might be able to, but I can't. So frustrating.

Finally, a picture from our holiday, which made me smile.