Freedom is a sports car — or at least that was the definition of
freedom when Zoran Jokic was a boy in Tito’s communist Yugoslavia. “Growing
up, we didn’t have many freedoms. A car meant so much to me —
space, room to breathe.”
Today, Jokic, who runs a delicatessen in the London borough of Richmond upon
Thames, at last has a sports car, although he fears it may not be for much
longer.
The Liberal Democrat-controlled council in the leafy borough has positioned
itself at the vanguard of the new green movement by leading the nation in a
drive to tax the drivers of bigger cars off the streets with hefty parking
charges, replacing some parking bays with double yellow lines and scrubbing
parking spaces and garages from the designs of new apartment and office
complexes.
The Liberal Democrat council leaders see themselves as environmental
visionaries, although many of their constituents don’t share their vision.
Sitting with an espresso and looking out of the window of his shop on Crown
Road, Jokic, 42, shakes his head.
“I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but now I live in a borough that takes away
another little freedom every day. In this country we are cramped by people
and cramped by legislation. It irritates me considerably, but at least in
this society I still have the freedom to speak out and raise my concerns.”
Richmond council’s latest weapon in its war on car owners is symptomatic of a
hostile approach that is causing car owners growing unease. It is a
motorised traffic spy — a Smart car with a camera attached to a
periscope on its roof. The car will home in on motorists parking on
pavements or those illegally parking around schools and pedestrian
crossings, recording the violations so the drivers can be issued with fixed
penalties.
Jokic’s concerns are shared by what appears to be a growing number of Richmond
residents. Jo Dunbar, a softly spoken herbal apothecary, looks an unlikely
revolutionary. But her tiny green MG convertible has just been ticketed
again. “I saw the b****** walking away across the road, and I would have
liked to chop his head off,” she declares.
Across the road, carpet retailer Martin Herdman has erected 1,000-watt
speakers outside his shop that emit an air-raid siren blast whenever parking
wardens are spotted in the vicinity — usually four or five times a
day. An underground network of fellow retailers and residents phone in
alerts, and children on bikes cycle ahead of the wardens to give warning.
The council promised public safety when it installed a CCTV camera on a pole
above the intersection at the heart of the St Margarets shopping area. What
it delivered was a twentyfold increase in parking tickets – from fewer than
50 a month to 944 in June.
The St Margarets retailers’ association is now allying with groups of
residents who have been forced to asphalt over their lawns and roses to
escape some of the highest street-parking charges in the country for the
family Volvo estate or four-wheel drive, or pay to rent space on a
neighbour’s driveway.
Even the local Green party, which first proposed a parking discount for
energy-efficient cars, believes the resultant scheme now unfairly penalises
poorer residents with midrange cars and no offstreet parking.
Karen Boother is an environmentally concerned resident and solicitor who tried
unsuccessfully to challenge the scheme legally on behalf of the loose
alliance. “It was odd to find myself on the same side as Jeremy Clarkson,”
she says. “But I suddenly understood the impact of this campaign against
drivers.”
She points out that this is a council whose leader, Serge Lourie — the
Liberal Democrat architect of the anti-carbon policies — emitted more
carbon dioxide than a fleet of extravagant gas guzzlers when he flew to the
borough’s American sister-city, Richmond, Virginia, for its 400th birthday
party.
Lourie, 61, is first to admit the trip was an “absolutely fantastic jolly”.
Joined by his wife, the mayor and two council officials on the transatlantic
junket, he used some tree-planting credits that his daughter had given him
for Christmas to “offset” the carbon emissions his trip had generated.
Was this campaigner against big cars, who encouraged the council to trade in
the mayoral 4 litre Daimler for a battery-powered Prius hybrid, just a tad
embarrassed at being chauffeured about Virginia in a black 4x4 with a bonnet
that came up to his chest? No, he says. He does not even admit to a slight
smile at the irony.
“We’re not trying to ban flying. We’re not trying to ban cars,” says Lourie.
“But to live in the centre of Kew with a 4x4 or a really big car seems
unnecessary.”
The council leader drives a 2 litre Skoda Octavia but plans to trade down to a
smaller car, and he often takes the bus to work. As he cycles around Kew
Gardens at weekends, one imagines him being lost in The Madness of King
Serge, alone with his environmental conspiracies and carbon dioxide emission
counts.
“My friends don’t like to talk about these things to me,” he admits.
If, at the end of the year, the parking charges have boosted council revenue,
he says he will reinvest that money in public transport and cutting charges
for energy-efficient cars.
He believes that his campaign to persuade residents to give up their big cars
will also make the roads safer for children and combat the obesity epidemic
by getting people walking and cycling. His administration will be remembered
as groundbreaking, he hopes, a pioneer in the fight to save our planet.
“Other councils are following us now,” he says. And he’s right. A third of
London councils, as well as Cambridge council and others around the country,
are looking on with interest to see how far Richmond can squeeze its
residents into new modes of behaviour.
If Richmond succeeds, its policies will have implications far beyond its
suburban borders. It will mean that councils throughout the land will feel
emboldened to use tax policies to regulate their constituents’ behaviour in
a way they have never done before.
Geoffrey Samuels, a Conservative councillor, worries that the council is
immersed in a deeper anticar philosophy motivated by far more than
environmentalism and road safety.
He traces a 50-year evolution in opposition to motorists. It is based, he
says, on social jealousy, because originally it was only the wealthy who
could afford cars. He also points to local authority politicians’ attempts
to build up their empires of public works and public transport by clamping
down on private vehicles.
The council collected £3.85m from more than 77,000 parking tickets last year.
In addition to its revenue from the ticketing blitz, the Conservatives claim
the council will rake in £185,000 more from residents’ parking permits.
These have soared in price for owners of midrange and larger cars with
emissions — £300 a year if you own some models of Renault Espace or
Ford Mondeo and £450 for the second car if you own two. The hike in charges
could be unlawful and open to legal challenge, say the Conservatives.
Certainly, car owners have been left with few other choices. When some
residents asphalted their gardens to create their own offstreet parking the
council countered by raising the administration fee charged for dropping the
kerb outside a house from £400 to £550, so further boosting its revenues.
When accused of using green arguments to disguise a cynical plan to extract
money from motorists, the Liberal Democrat council counters by saying its
policies are actually reducing its income in some areas: discounts for
drivers of small energy-efficient cars, together with the overall reduction
of cars, will apparently cost it £131,000 in revenue this year.
Still, this is small beer compared with the income it is getting from
motorists, which is a bit galling when you consider that the council makes
generous free provision for its own drivers.
This is an authority that owns or leases 300 parking spaces for staff and
councillors, even though the civic offices are about 400 yards from
Twickenham railway station and numerous bus stops, and it’s an authority in
which only six of the 4,000 employees have bought into its new bike-to-work
scheme. This is an authority where, beneath the shadow of Twickenham rugby
stadium, a new Liberal Democrat councillor, Ben Khosa, followed up his
election victory last year by rebricking his front yard to retain offstreet
parking for his big blue Mercedes-Benz E 200 and the silver BMW 316i his son
drives, thereby saving an estimated £337 this year. This is also an
authority whose deputy leader, Stephen Knight, believes the single best
thing he could do for Richmond would be to reduce the number of cars on its
roads. He said: “They burn the planet, kill innocent pedestrians and turn
mild-mannered people into selfish road-rage monsters.”
Tellingly, he added: “Also, I wouldn’t encounter so many jams on my drive to
the civic centre.”
Milly Picton, an 18-year-old school student, believes she knows the council’s
real motivation for making life difficult for motorists. She was ticketed
for moving her broken-down car off the road and out of the path of school
buses and other traffic.
Milly, who had been driving for only a month in a secondhand white Ford
Fiesta, had just left home on her way to school when the car shuddered,
slowed and stopped. With traffic backing up behind her, two men jumped out
of their white van and helped push her car up on the kerb.
But when she came back to collect it after school, she had been fined £40.
Milly is angry, She says she did what she thought was best to get the car
out of the rush-hour traffic flow. With only a little part-time work as a
waitress, £40 is a lot of money to her.
“Richmond is anti-car,” she says.
“They say they care about the environment, but I think it’s all about the
money.”
