Planner1

Easier said than done. Like I said, they don’t have the staff resources to sustain a zero tolerance approach across the city and you aren’t going to recruit additional staff and train them up for an exercise that lasts a few months. It isn’t the type of work that anyone can do ( or wants to do) and you need to be properly trained.

Unfortunately, life isn’t like that. People have their own jobs to do and aren’t looking out for and reporting every transgression of every rule in the book. Breaking parking rules is rife everywhere and to an extent, generally tolerated as a result. Any authority, ie council or police, who suddenly adopted a zero tolerance policy would be viewed a being too draconian. Police and councils simply do not have the resources to enforce to that extent.

Yes they can do it via fixed cameras, but I’d think you’d need several to cover the number of bus stops in Wicker, which wouldn’t be cheap, so finding the money might be an issue. Best way to approach it might be to lobby the lead councillor for transport and the local councillors for that area. You need strong political support for initiatives like that.

Have you ever asked the police or the council to enforce it?

It wouldn’t bring in cash for them. Any prosecutions they make are dealt with through the courts.

If you were really interested in that, you could send in an FOI request and find out how many tickets they issue in those locations and how many they issue with the camera vehicle. With regard to your accusation that the council don’t enforce in certain areas, I can tell you that it certainly was not true while I worked there. I can’t say what is done now. When we used the camera vehicle to enforce no waiting / no loading restrictions, I used to have to respond to the many complaints received about the number of tickets issued on Spital Hill / Burngreave Rd and surrounding area. I personally visited local stakeholders, including the mosque and explained to them why they were being ticketed and what they could do to avoid it ( ie comply with the restrictions). No concessions were made. Enforcement carried on as before ( until the government stopped councils from using camera enforcement on those restrictions). In a good few years of being involved in enforcement I never saw or heard of any instruction not to enforce certain areas ( and I asked the managers at parking services whether any such instruction had ever been given and I was told no) I asked for and saw evidence that enforcement certainly was being carried out in the areas where this accusation arises like Page Hall, Wolesey Rd, Burngreave etc, just the same as it is elsewhere. This is quite a big city, parking services have limited resources. They can’t be everywhere at once. They have priorities, which are agreed with senior management and politicians. They carry out enforcement in accordance with those priorities. Some locations will only ever get occasional enforcement. People being people, tend to recognise that they can get away with parking where they shouldn’t most of the time in such places, so they risk it. The penalties available to the council ( set by government) a great deterrent to most nowadays. If you visit other places, you’ll see similar levels of non-compliance with parking restrictions. I see it wherever I go.

If you used your brain cells you might take the trouble to understand how parking contraventions have to be enforced, then you would know why what you suggest is largely impractical. For a start, parking contraventions are not “crimes”, the offences have been decriminalised so councils can enforce them Most parking contraventions involve some observation by a civil enforcement officer before a ticket is issued, to check for example whether loading / unloading is taking place. 10 minutes of observation is often necessary before a ticket can be issued. In practice, that means that many drivers just move off and get away with it. Sneaking around in unmarked vehicles would be viewed as unfair by many. Practical enforcement isn’t as simple or lucrative as you and others may think.

Camera enforcement can only be used on school entrance markings and bus stop clearways. It used to be permitted to camera enforce other parking contraventions such as no waiting / no loading restrictions, but the government changed the regulations to stop it. So, most restrictions can only be enforced by a civil enforcement officer, in person.

If the pavements, corners and junctions don’t have yellow lines around them, there’s nothing the council can do, it’s only the police who can enforce and they usually have other priorities.

Parking enforcement is highly regulated and most tickets have to be issued by a civil enforcement officer in person at the time of the contravention. Only a few parking contraventions, such as parking on school entrance markings or bus stop clearways, can be enforced by camera, and these have to be recorded on devices approved by the government. This is how the government have set up the regulations. Supplying parking services with information on times and locations where people see parking contraventions is useful and parking services do send out CEO’s to enforce them. There’s a contact page on the council website here

All that information is available online. Do a few searches instead of expecting others to do it for you.

That might sound the best way to do it in an ideal world, but unfortunately the real world isn’t ideal. Also none of us looking in from the outside know every detail of the project. The people who are planning and delivering it do have all the information and are using it to deliver the project within its constraints. There are often very good reasons why things are done in what might look to you to be a counter intuitive sequence. These projects are being done using government funding. Often, the funding pots have very tight timescales by which they need to be spent. That might dictate the order in which you plan things, particularly if you are funding your project from multiple sources ( like this one) ie get the time limited funding spent first, to mitigate the risk of losing it. You might also have problems with refurbishing a building, meaning those works will take longer than expected and cost more, so you prioritise a different phase of the works, like the paving and planting, if they don’t restrict your ability to do the building work. That keeps you spending the funding you have, perhaps while you look for and get approval of other funding to deal with cost increases. Sometimes it can take a good while to secure additional funding. Because they are cash strapped, Councils are increasingly reluctant to commit to works unless they have funding certainty, whereas in previous times they might have started work at risk while they get the necessary funding approvals. The people delivering the projects ( who are mainly private sector designers, planners, engineers, architects, project managers etc ) are well experienced in that work and understand very well how to programme their work, taking into account all the constraints. They have specialist people whose job it is to plan and schedule works. There are many permutations of how you might deliver projects like this. Often things get changed around during the development or delivery of the project, for many reasons. To just expect things to happen exactly the way you might think they should from a position of little knowledge of the project and its complexities is a pretty unreasonable position to take, in my view.

You and others can do an internet search just as well as I can.

Incorrect. It’s being paid for by central government grant, which your taxes will have contributed to.

Construction prices were rising at about 25% per annum.

I see plenty of business cases for schemes in other council areas. This one was costed in 2020 and construction costs have gone up massively since then. It isn’t unusual to see costs doubling or more on the schemes I see. Nothing to do with council competence. Just inflation.

Council roadworks page says end of April. Give them a call on 2734567 if you want more details.

Most of the vehicles are old, obsolete and need replacing. Same for whoever is operating them.

It is. I’m talking about the city region, which is something different. One explanation is: Typically, it denotes a city, conurbation or urban zone with multiple administrative districts, but sharing resources like a central business district, labour market and transport network such that it functions as a single economic unit Government tends to hand transport funding out on a regional basis. With the advent of devolved funding, it’s usually to the combined authority. The point is that the nearby cities that people often compare us to, Leeds and Manchester, often get a lot more transport funding than SYMCA, because they are significantly bigger in population terms.

Problem is that people like yourself like to compare us with Leeds and Manchester. They are larger cities in terms of the city region population they serve. Leeds city region has a population of circa 3 million and Manchester is 2.8 million. Whereas Sheffield is around 1.6 million. Comparisons with places twice your size aren’t fair ones, are they? Levels of government funding tend to reflect population, so naturally Leeds and Manchester get more than we do and will look to have more happening in terms of public funded projects etc.

They did. Extending to Broomhill and Ranmoor was looked at. Locals were against it, so it didn’t go any further.

They direct policy and strategy ( which is important), including developing new policies and strategies, decide how service budgets will be spent and the makeup and size of the teams under them. They are responsible for corporate plans and the performance and budget monitoring that goes with them. Senior managers review and approve all spending decisions of any size. They also review and sign off any reports which are going to governance / decision making bodies. They often sit on boards which oversee the governance of projects. Directors are often the senior responsible officer on projects. They often sit on partnership bodies where they work with other partners ( such as the other South Yorkshire local authorities and the MCA in the transport field of work). That’s where decisions are made on what transport schemes should be progressed (or not) on a regional basis. They often also sit on sub national (eg Transport for the North) and national bodies like the Core Cities group. Heads of service, directors and Chief Execs are extremely busy people.

Depends what it says in the contract specification. I haven’t read it. I’d say overall condition has deteriorated recently, but most other places I go, the roads are as bad or worse.

And obviously had reasonable contractual grounds for doing so. Do Sheffield?

Tell that to your elected representatives in central government. They set it up that way.