Awareness campaign aims to tackle poor parking practices in Limerick
THE LOCAL authority is to initiate an awareness campaign aimed at preventing people parking illegally across Limerick city and county.
The news was revealed in an answer to a notice of motion submitted to this month's metropolitan district council meeting by Social Democrat member Elisa O’Donovan.
She homed in on the public plaza outside Colbert Station saying a campaign is needed to prevent people using this area to park in.
“Cars on the plaza are causing long-term damage. It's also a hazard to pedestrians. We need to run an awareness campaign,” she said.
In a written response, director Brian Kennedy said council’s marketing and communications team is to link in with An Garda Siochana for a campaign for parking across Limerick.
The move has been welcomed by Ballylanders woman Maureen Browne, whose Step Forward group has been highlighting poor parking since 2004.
“I've never seen parking as bad as it is now. At one stage, I had to get off the footpath myself because I could not get down between the wall and the wing mirror of the car. Ihad to come out onto the road,” she explained.
Maureen, who is partially sighted, depends on hearing oncoming cars for this reason.
However, the advent of electric cars - which run with little or no noise at all - has made things very tough for her.
“A footpath is a footpath. If it's going to be used with cars up on top of it, then it's no longer a footpath,” she explains.
“As a group, we have worked with Limerick City and County Council and there’s been some brilliant work done in places. They’ve removed some of the poles which we’ve highlighted in the middle of footpaths.”
At present, a council spokesperson said the joint campaign to stamp out poor parking practices is only in the planning stages.
“Cars might not be parked in a disability parking space, they might be parked in the yellow box before or after it. Or they could even be parked outside of it. But cars would still be blocking off disabled spaces,” Maureen said.