DfT pledges to revise guidance on CPZ signs

25 October 2006

The Department for Transport has acknowledged that the signing of parking restrictions can be unclear to motorists, and pledged to revise guidance on traffic signs to tackle the issue.
The department last week admitted that research it commissioned found motorists were being unfairly penalised by unclear and over-complicated signing regimes, and in response, said it would, consult later this year on revising Chapter 3 of the Traffic signs manual and the operational guidance.
MPs on the transport select committee had demanded to know why, two years on, the DfT had taken no action on the report by TRL on how signage could be improved. Ministers retorted that TRL ‘had not identified robust solutions for dealing with signage problems arising from increasingly-complex restrictions’.
TRL had – in a report published last summer (Surveyor, 7 July 2005) – recommended yellow repeater plates to overcome the problem identified by the backbenchers that, in controlled parking zones, ‘motorists are having to walk half-a-mile to find the regulations’.
Ministers will – when consulting on new operational guidance to replace circular 1/95 – invite views on whether good practice guidance is needed on the appropriate size for CPZs, created to reduce the need for costly and intrusive signage.
Graham Marsh, parking manager at Manchester City Council, commented: ‘There is the potential for CPZs to get too big, but, equally, confusion can be caused by them being too small.
‘We must be able to identify a middle-ground somewhere.’
A repeater sign, drawn up by the DfT for Manchester, designed to dispel confusion among motorists in an experimental CPZ around Manchester’s Sport City facility that was introduced without any yellow lines, was a possible model for CPZs nationally, he said.
But Nick Lester, London Councils’ director of transport and environment, was more sceptical about what the DfT could do to tackle the problem. ‘The whole point of CPZs is that they reduce the number of signs required. Repeater signs would have to be placed everywhere, eliminating the benefits of a CPZ.’
Parking restrictions had, in recent years, been increasingly tailored to ensure that they were appropriate – as with match day restrictions – and if motorists did not want them to be the same everywhere, regardless of the need, they should be aware that they were likely to vary, he said.

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DfT pledges to revise guidance on CPZ signs

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