Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Economy and Transport – in the Senedd at 1:40 pm on 22 January 2020.
Can I add my voice to that of Hefin? I think we've all had casework as well as observing really poor practice. I commend Living Streets Cymru, which commissioned a research survey of over 1,000 people—so that's a lot of people in Wales—and that found that 83 per cent of respondents favoured banning pavement parking. Now, I know, in practice, that would create some problems, particularly in those areas that have been so badly designed that there's little option but to park on the pavement or on part of the pavement, but the basic principle should be that you should not obstruct pavements. What on earth are parents with pushchairs or people who are wheelchair-dependent, or just pedestrians, supposed to do?
This is not the way we should be conducting the design of new urban spaces. But it's a long-standing problem in many areas where people really don't have to park on the pavement, but they do so because then it allows traffic to flow in urban areas both ways. Sometimes, we should see that queuing traffic as part of traffic control, and you don't have a right to race through at any speed just to get from A to B. The pedestrian ought to start to be king here.