You cannot park, unload or deliver outside my house.
Such are the downsides, and the upsides, of living on a red route.
It made life a bit awkward when I moved in. The removal driver chose to park his van up on the pavement, which was probably illegal but nobody seemed to mind quite so much back then. But it's got much harder to park round here since the turn of the century, not least thanks to the shoehorning in of a segregated cycle superhighway, and I'm increasingly uncertain what'd happen if I ever had to move out.
Bow Road is the A11, hence a red route, which is why parking isn't generally allowed along it. Just down the road is the A12, ditto, indeed that's so parking-unfriendly it was once classified as a motorway. The McDonald's drive-thru car park by the Bow Roundabout is for customers only, including the stipulation that "drivers and passengers must remain on the premises", with a £100 if they catch you breaching the rules. Fairfield Road has on-street parking but it's a four minute walk away and residents permits only, so no use either. The only closer road is Payne Road, a brief runty loop round McDonalds which is mostly double yellow lines and permit-only bays. And now I see they're bringing in a new stopping order to make even Payne Road delivery-unfriendly, which in an increasingly delivery-focused economy is pretty awkward.
Red routes are thankfully always provided with 'loading boxes' marked on the road where deliveries are permitted at certain times. Our local one is on the approach to the Bow Roundabout, occupying one lane, but can only be used during off-peak hours. Arrive between 10am and 4pm or overnight, or any time on Sundays, and you're allowed to stop for 20 minutes. This is great as far as it goes, except it can be difficult to tie down a delivery to only happen during the permitted times. Also there's only room for two vehicles, or one if it's a truck, so if your delivery turns up and it's full you are essentially buggered. Two spaces may have been deemed sufficient ten years ago, but another 122 flats have been built in this parking desert since then and it's hardly enough to go round.
What a lot of delivery drivers do is pull into the notch outside Bow Baptist Church on Payne Road and unload on the yellow lines there. It's out of the main flow of traffic, hence not generally an obstruction, so loading and unloading is legally permitted for a maximum of 40 minutes. But now I see Tower Hamlets council are proposing "Access to Church, introduce No Loading At Any Time", as just announced in a laminated sign tied to a signpost, so even that option is to be taken away from us. It's a much-abused space parking-wise so I can see why they're doing it. But after 21 days they could be back to paint double chevrons on the kerbside and that'll be our informal delivery option permanently withdrawn.
Back in 2019, for tediously annoying reasons. I needed to replace my gas cooker with a electric one. They turned up, spotted I lived on a red route and gave up. I rebooked, pointing out that two delivery spaces were available during certain times, but on arrival they told me switching from gas to electric would take a lot longer than 20 minutes so bad luck. I rebooked, suggesting turning up ridiculous early on a Sunday to avoid the traffic wardens and thankfully they agreed otherwise I'd still be without hot food. But they only did it by using the pull-in on Payne Road and soon that won't be officially possible, or at least not legally.
Because that's the other peril of living round here, the local parking enforcement officers are actually based at this end of Bow Road inside a Metropolitan Police facility. Risk parking somewhere you shouldn't for even a couple of minutes and these uncheery souls could walk straight out on duty and nab you, or indeed on their return to base, so your chance of being fined here is unusually high. It's not as high as if cameras were being used to detect infractions, so at least we're not yet at peak Parking Fine Slappability. But everything about loading and unloading round my way is difficult, and annoyingly increasingly so.
I suspect this is much more an inner city problem than for those in the suburbs or provinces where off-street parking is more widely available. At least in urban areas receiving deliveries by bike or moped is more the norm and they don't have the same parking issues, but that still doesn't help when what's arriving is an appliance, two weeks' shopping or all your worldly belongings. Then there's the ongoing emergence of draconian parking restrictions on private housing developments, where entire streets are now plastered with scary signs warning of £100 fines imposed by unseen guardians if you even dare to pause your engine. Deliveries sometimes come with a whopping unexpected additional cost.
If the future of retail is delivery then we need better unloading options, or at least more consideration of where a van might park when imposing additional restrictions. Drivers will always find somewhere to stop because their livelihoods depend on it, but for some of us receiving deliveries is getting inexorably incrementally inconveniently harder.
