The wider council policy context
Our Corporate Strategy sets out what we as a council plan to do, how we plan to do it, and how we will measure our performance. Our main aim is to improve people's lives, and we are following two core policies to do this: tackling the climate and nature emergency and giving people a bigger say. This consultation, and the policy it concerns, addresses both strategies:
- It sets out proposals which will prioritise available on-street parking for local residents
- It gives you an opportunity to comment on our proposals, and take an active part in how this scheme moves forward
Air quality, managing traffic flows and availability of parking are all significant issues in our region, particularly in the city of Bath. We have a number of ongoing projects which are addressing these issues, including the following:
- Promoting a major shift to mass transport, walking and cycling, with incentives to reduce the use of more polluting vehicles, in accordance with the UK government National Air Quality Strategy
- Our policy and work on Liveable Neighbourhoods aims to reduce the dominance of vehicles in residential areas, particularly through-traffic, whilst maintaining vehicle access to homes and businesses. We can do this through a range of measures including prioritising walking and cycling infrastructure, limiting through traffic, traffic calming, one-way streets, and residents’ parking zones.
- We have introduced Bath's Clean Air Zone, which encourages less polluting ways of travelling around the city centre
- Improving the safety of cyclists and pedestrians through Active Travel Schemes which rebalance priorities on our roads and build on social distancing needs
- Co-ordinating and consulting on our Journey to Net Zero for reducing the environmental impact of transport in Bath.
The parking policy context
Our approach to managing parking aligns closely with our wider aims as a council to promote more active ways of travel, encourage take-up of lower emissions vehicles, and to rebalance our roads and neighbourhoods so that motor vehicles become less dominant.
Previous consultation
We developed a residents’ parking scheme proposal for this area, with additional proposals for parking permits to cover local businesses and their visitors. We communicated the policy to all residents living within the boundary of the proposed RPZ and invited responses from the general public. This policy consultation ran from 22 October to 18 November 2021.
View the consultation feedback report
This consultation
In order to implement or enforce parking restrictions of any kind on a public road, we need to get approval for a Traffic Regulation Order (TRO). The TRO is an amended plan for the RPZ, based on the feedback report from the first consultation. This is a legal document that gives our Enforcement Officers the necessary powers to control parking, and there is a legal process we must follow to put it into action. We do this in the following ways:
- your local Ward Members and B&NES Cabinet Members for Transport and Emergency Services discuss the TRO
- there is a public consultation, where residents and the general public have a last opportunity to comment on the final proposal plan included within the TRO. At this stage, we give you a last opportunity to state whether you support or object to the TRO, and to give your reasons for any objections. This consultation period normally lasts 21 days but we are extending it to 28 days because of the size of the area this proposal covers.
- we publish a summary of the comments we receive during these consultations in a report. Our Director of Place Management then makes the final informed decision about implementing the scheme, based on this report.