Letter: Pavement parking

Sir: Gareth Durling (letter, 21 January) is right to identify the problem of vehicles parking on pavements. Not only pedestrians, but pram pushers and wheelchair users can be forced to divert into the road, making a mockery of investment put into dropped kerbs for people with impaired mobility.

But there is a second issue: pavement parking results in broken and unstable paving and this causes injury, sometimes lasting. This is a major cause of the rising cost of highways liability claims which are bleeding local authority highways maintenance budgets dry. Hence the apparently trivial problem of pavement parking constitutes a multi-million cost to society and a brake on the development of an integrated transport policy.

D BAYLISS

Chairman, Transport Board

The Institution of Civil Engineers

London SW1