Uppermill Parking Restrictions Delayed
The car park at the museum in Uppermill will have a three-hour limit.
New time limits on most car parks in Uppermill won’t be enforced for another two weeks. They were due to come into action tomorrow, but have now been put off until 14 February.
The reason for the delay wasn’t immediately clear. Although it seems likely it’s because Oldham Council had said it would give two weeks notice of the date when the restrictions would take effect, and had apparently not done so in time for them to be imposed in the morning.
The car parks at Smithy Lane, the Hare and Hounds, and the King George V playing fields will have a two-hour limit, with a three-hour restriction on the museum car park. Vehicles won’t be allowed to return within four hours. The limits will operate between 8am and 6pm, seven days a week.
The car park near the leisure centre above Uppermill won’t have any restrictions. All will remain free.
The idea of time limits was proposed as a way of freeing up spaces in the village car parks, to try to attract more visitors and shoppers. However, the plans have divided opinion among local people and businesses, with some concerned they will be forced to interrupt their work several times a day to move their vehicles.
Meanwhile, Oldham Council has been consulting some local people on whether a paid-for permit scheme could be introduced for residents’ parking. The deadline to respond to that consultation is this coming Friday.
The issue was debated at last week’s Saddleworth Parish Council meeting. You can read a Saddleworth News report of that discussion here.
Author: Jude Gidney - Editor
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If I was a visitor to the area, I would have to think twice before I came to an area where my visit is limited to two hours. Not enough time for a good meal and a pint, let alone a good walk and a visit to the museum….. A shot in the foot me thinks!!!
If I was a visitor th the area, looking for a nice “day” out, would have to reconsider coming to an area where a “day” out is restricted to 2 hours enforceable by a fine….. A shot in the foot I think…..
It’s not much fun for residents either-more pavement parking to follow…
I assume that, in all this, OMBC have looked at how other similar areas manage their parking?
Surely Uppermill is not unique in being in this particular parking pickle.
The corollary of ‘doing something’ is ‘do nothing’. Yet it would be too much to hope that, to the unrelentingly meddlesome council, they do not necessarily have to jump to the beck of those who bawl fortissimo. But they do – particularly when business rates are at stake – and damn the residents.
As one who has lived here life-long (65yrs) I despair at the growth industry in Saddleworth that is pettifoggery from our masters at the Civic Centre in Oldham ( when built, a brutal and unwholesome edifice betokening the breaking of the spirit of a once proud Oldham), who appear to have nothing better to do than to despoil our hilly landscapes with needless -and dangerous – signs everywhere, instructing us all to order our lives to the agenda they dictate. The fact that on ‘our side'(Saddleworth) there are local councillors who are thick (and how!) with the Oldham panjandrums is dispiriting.
Whose idea exactly was it to limit parking time in Uppermill? For what, and for whom? Eager to make criminals of all us, were we to resist the payment of a £75 fine for overstaying the arbitary time limit thought up and imposed by some nameless lawmaker. Another ‘earner’ for Oldham is it? They’ve certainly managed to render the once busy streets of Oldham lifeless. Their endeavour seems to be to want to to make us all shop at American like ‘malls’, …and Tesco. Evidently Saddleworth is already on their wrecking agenda.
Whose idea was it to institute a residents permit scheme, for which we will all have to pay an annual fee of £50 (as a start. in short order it will only increase as the insatiable greed of the council is well known).
Whose idea was it to listen, with a sympathetic ear, to the whining of the bus companies that want to drive hulking great double and single-decker buses through the narrow streets of certain of our villages unimpeded by resident’s vehicles parked outside their houses? Has the cure to be even more double yellow lines to shaft through the bucolic haze of complacency we Saddleworthers are assumed to live in? Certain other countries, by the way, manage to use narrow buses for narrow roads and streets. Who would’ve thought it, eh? Not we tripe-eaters seemingly.
Now Saddleworth is merely a suburb of Oldham, I can tell you with certainty that it was a heck of lot better when we were an outlying parish of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and we paid our dues via Wakefield. We even had, then, MP’s who represented us at Westminster. Distant days.