‘We live by one of UK’s busiest roads – it’s not the noise that makes it …
Families who live by one of the UK’s busiest roads have described it as ‘hell’ – but it’s not the noise that is causing problems.
Tritton Road is Lincolnshire’s busiest road but is surprisingly quiet. Residents have retail parks and supermarkets[1] on their doorstep but this is precisely where the problem lies.
With so much traffic from commuters and delivery drivers to university students driving up at all hours, it’s actually the parking[2] that’s causing most of the issues. Aerospace engineering graduate Kalem Harrison, 24, and engineering student Chloe Tumilty, 21, live right on the corner between Coulson Road and Tritton Road and said the parking situation on the road was “terrible”.
The pair, originally from Newcastle and Sunderland, told Lincolnshire Live[3] that they had struggled with parking the entirety of their time spent living there. Ms Tumilty said: “It’s fine living here but the parking is terrible because of all the double-yellow lines.
“We’ve had to start paying to go to the local gym just so we can park our car there. If you can’t find a parking space outside your own home, you’ll have to park all the way at the end of the street – and that’s 15 minutes away. I work quite late sometimes, so I can end up parking down there and having to walk back up on my own in the dark. The noise isn’t the problem here.”
Mr Harrison said that it was during this time that he had been given two parking tickets for parking up outside his house. Meanwhile another resident had once been handed six in a month. He said: “He started paying for the gym even though he didn’t go. He just needed somewhere to park.”
He said he’s even had problems with people scavenging through their bins or students loudly walking home drunk paled against the parking situation. He said: “You’ll get drunk students walking by at 4am and you can’t keep your bins out at night because people will go through them. But it’s not too bad – it doesn’t keep you up at night.”
Aodhán Burrows, 26, lived down the street as a student and praised it as a scenic place to live. “The noise is fine once you get about halfway down the street,” he said. “We never had any issues with it but I can see it getting worse if more and more students are moving in. Then you’ll have five or six cars per house, rather than just two.”
He added that since a nearby factory had been demolished, leaving behind a spacious bit of grassland and opening up a view of Lincoln Cathedral, it had made the street a more pleasant place to live. “It’s a lot nicer to look at now,” he said. Retiree Steven East, 70, has lived by the road for 15 years. He said the people who were living there were being punished when it was student drivers who were temporarily taking up the parking spaces.
“We’re suffering from people leaving their cars in the street for more than a week and not moving,” he said. “Four or five parking tickets are being handed out here a week, but the students come and go so a lot of these tickets end up going to the residents – it seems unfair.”
“You’ll also see cars start arriving on the street after 8am, and people will park up and then go to work. They don’t come back until 5pm so the people who live here are always fighting for the parking spaces.
“You really are lucky if you can get one.” Like Mr Harrison and Ms Tumilty, Mr East said he had no issues with the noise coming from the heavy flow of traffic hurtling to and from the city centre.
He said: “Every house has double-glazing now, so the noise from the cars is minimal. But we have had a lot of noise from construction when they’ve been building student accommodation. Planning permission for new student permission has been granted nearby, and I’m sure when they start construction on that, it will be a noise issue. But it’s been like that for a while now.”
Though these issues persist, Mr East otherwise said living by the road was “lovely”. The variety of retail parks nearby, with Morrison’s and Farmfoods supermarkets not a five-minute walk away, mean that essentials are always close at hand.
Mr East added: “I’m quite happy living here, really. You can buy anything in this area – anything and everything. Everything you require is within walking distance. And you’ve only got to walk down the river there and you’re in the countryside.”
Noise and parking were also lesser issues for James Lewis, a 19-year-old student, but he said queues were to be expected if you were driving. He said: “I walk to university every day and it’s not too busy, but when you’re driving the queues can be pretty annoying.
“You’ll try and get onto the road and just be stuck in a standstill. You can be in a jam for three or four minutes, which doesn’t sound a lot but it feels like a long time when you’re in it. But I don’t think it’s a huge problem.
“You’ll get the occasional police car or ambulance going by, and parking on Coulson Road can be pretty difficult when it’s crammed. Vans will be fighting over spaces and people will even leave their bins in the way so they can guarantee themselves a parking space.”
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References
- ^ supermarkets (www.mirror.co.uk)
- ^ parking (www.mirror.co.uk)
- ^ Lincolnshire Live (www.lincolnshirelive.co.uk)
- ^ M&S’s ‘magic’ £45 shaping jeans ‘make your bum look great’ according to reviews (www.mirror.co.uk)