Recently I have been driving my brother around in his car and have noticed how inconsiderate people are in parking in Disabled Parking Bays when not entitled. Mike my brother is a Blue Badge holder and has great difficulty walking any distance. This means a Disabled Parking Bay which is near to the point of access to a building is essential for him to get about. I have witnessed a number of occasions where able bodied people, in some cases even works vans and work men routinely pull up and park in a Disabled Bay.
Here is a short video from Youtube, albeit American which shows a classic example of this kind of thoughtlessness
Now interestingly having done some research and from October 2004, Part III of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 came into effect within the United Kingdom. This legislation places a legal requirement on service providers to ensure that disabled people do not find it unreasonably difficult or impossible to enjoy the service in the same way as non-disabled people.
Failure to provide monitoring could result in a heavy financial penalty, as disabled drivers exercise their rights to compensation under the terms of the Act.There are a number of requirements which apply to the provision of disabled parking bays. Bays should be within 50m of the entrance to a building, and should be lined or painted to make their presence clear.
Now I am no legal expert and you should not rely on anything I say here without your own research. However there is an obligation to provide monitoring of the service such as parking bays. Therefore next time you go to the Supermarket for example and see drivers abusing this facility complain to the management and remind them of their legal obligation to monitor the parking bays!
Now to be fair and balanced there is abuse by Blue badge Holders. The below link will if you copy and paste it into your browser will take you to a Youtube Video from Brent Council (they disabled the facility that would allow me to show it here) where they conduct an enforcement operation where you see perfectly able bodies people using the Blue Badge illegally to avoid paying parking charges. This in my view is an even worse abuse of the system as it totally devalues the importance of the disabled parking facility.
http://youtu.be/BB-XwR2YfkQ
Disabled Parking Bay Rage - Now some try to make light of this serious issue and make jokes like in the video below.
However if your reading this and have no personal experience or understanding of why this issue is important take a few moments to watch this Youtube video below.
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Disabled Parking Bay Rage - So where do you stand on this issue? Have you had such an experience or have you been an abuser? Leave your comments below