Legal / practical implications of shared turning area

[Moonshine]

I am working through the site layout plan, and the site is beginning to work better with turning on site with a shared turning area with two plots next to each other.

 

Does anyone have any thoughts and potential issues of having this type of arrangement?

[Jeremy Harris]

There's a  small development near us (four houses) that has a shared hammerhead turning area.  From what I can gather it causes a lot of friction, as it ends up being used as overflow parking when anyone up there has guests, so forcing the others to reverse out down the shared drive.

[Ferdinand]

42 minutes ago, Moonshine said:

I am working through the site layout plan, and the site is beginning to work better with turning on site with a shared turning area with two plots next to each other.

 

Does anyone have any thoughts and potential issues of having this type of arrangement?

 

i think this is always not ideal, but works best if the rules are very clear, and the physical layout is such that breaking them is as diddicult as possible.

 

That is nebulous, but I get things from it like making sure that the turning area is separate from the parking areas, and that there is not room for 1 car to squeeze in to it whilst there still being anything like room for a turnaround. So that violations are obvious.

 

Can you do anything like provide a dual purpose lawn/turn for both properties separately?

 

F

 

[lizzie]

Don't do it if you can possibly avoid it.  Shared anything is always a potential problem.

[nod]

Agree with the above 

Will finish up parking 

First up best dressed 

[ProDave]

As above a shared turning area will be used as overflow parking, that can be guaranteed.

 

Do you NEED a turning space or is it just to appease the planners?  i.e. we had to provide a turning space to comply with the planning requirements but we never use it (my Landrover is parked on it most of the time)  I simply reverse from the road onto my parking space.

 

If it is actually needed paint some double yellow lines all around it?

[Moonshine]

39 minutes ago, ProDave said:

Do you NEED a turning space or is it just to appease the planners?  i.e. we had to provide a turning space to comply with the planning requirements but we never use it 

 

Its a planning thing to allow turning within the curtilage of the dwellings, i don't think that there is enough space for the template turning area, withing each curtilage, so there may need to be some shared area.

 

However that doesn't mean i can't make the turning area as large as possible within each curtilage to minimise the area needed to be shared, that said the planners haven't specified how many point turn is required.

 

https://youtu.be/iLKR9tCiwvA?t=16

 

 

[Ferdinand]

I think it should be possible to arrange it geometrically such that Party A cannot park in the turning area head without completely blocking access for Party B to their drive eg if you make A reverse onto the bit outside B’s entrance in order to turn and vice-versa.

 

If you really wanted to you could set it up a little like Tyneside Flats where A owns the bit outside B’s entrance where they reverse to turn, and vice-versa, and B only has a right of way over it.

 

The trick is to make the bit when A turns impossible for B to park on and similarly the other way. One way to do that is to set the gates vpback sufficiently far on a common Y entrance to be too short to park, whilst making the road too narrow for a side-park to leave room to turn. 

 

I have one possible scheme but uploads are currently dead.

 

Ferdinand

 

[Moonshine]

On 22/03/2019 at 17:29, Ferdinand said:

I have one possible scheme but uploads are currently dead.

 

If you could that would be great as currently struggling visualising what you mean.

[Triassic]

The shared turning area is a bad idea, someone will park in it !

[Ferdinand]

 

6 hours ago, Moonshine said:

On 22/03/2019 at 17:29, Ferdinand said:

I have one possible scheme but uploads are currently dead.

 

If you could that would be great as currently struggling visualising what you mean.

 

Let's frame this @recoveringacademic style:

 

Problem Statement: 

How do I prevent anyone parking on a turning area shared between 2 houses, and minimise any conflict when that happens?

 

Solution principles:

 

You need to

 

1 - Design out grey areas, so that there is nothing to argue about. For example, make it so that the shared area is either "clear" or "clearly blocked"; do not make it big enough for "nearly 2 cars", so that people will think they can fit in and leave turning space. 
2 - Make it such that blocking the turning area is not trivial, and it is very very clear that things are gummed up. Houston, we have a problem! not Houston, do we have a problem?
3 - Design it to encourage reasonable behaviour from typical people.
4 - Design it such that enforcement in extremis is straightforward and as clear as possible (which follows from no 1 and 2).

 

Case Study

 

Let me try and clarify what I mean by a walkthough exploring a "Y" shared driveway. Apologies if I am teaching you to suck eggs.

 

1 - We all agree that separate entrances and parking for each house are the best. You are constrained here in a way that stops you doing that. 

 

2 - So we are now in a game of trying to use the physical design / layout to meet the constraints whilst also attempting to minimise the possibility of conflict ... though we can never guarantee that that won't happen, because human beings are bloody-minded sometimes, and sometimes circumstances force us to walk the limits (eg child cannot buy house, and partner moves in so we suddenly have an extra car).

 

3 - My first port of call would be to see whether I can shift that requirement to exit the site in a forward gear ie onsite turning space). I do not know if that is possible by careful compliance with local planning policy if (for example) it is an unclassified road, or if a wide verge can be used for turning. That would need someone experienced who really knows the policy to comment on.

 

For example, our local policy says:

 

Quote

 

General layout of a private residential development 

 

3.218 Even if a road is not to be adopted you should still seek to make sure that: 

 

" your layouts are safe (both in terms of road safety and personal safety); 

" your layouts are accessible to all likely users, including those with mobility impairments; and 

" suitable long-term maintenance arrangements are in place. 

 

Turning facilities will be required: 

 

" where a proposed development takes access from a road with a speed limit above 40 mph; 

or " for roads subject to speed limits less than 40 mph on any road carrying 300 vehicles per hour at its peak 

 

Elsewhere, turning facilities will not normally be required unless road safety would be compromised.

 

 

 

I believe that that last statement leaves scope for not having turning facilities inside a 'small development'. I think. But I would need to prove that it was justifiable in the context.

 

(I think that that is an outworking of research which went into the Manual for Streets (1990s edition) showing that previously the risks of accidents assumed to exist with driveways directly onto roads with higher-than-minimal traffic had been overestimated, so guidance was liberalised (and link or distributor-roads with no houses on in estates became less rigidly imposed.)

 

What does yours actually say? It is perhaps not the sort of thing you will be told without asking.

 

4 - Moving on to actual design. It is really about the way to design a shared area such that conflict is designed out as far as possible eg by discouraging people from parking on it.

 

5. Worked example:

 

Consider a Y entrance into a pair of houses A and B where the stem of the Y is common, and the branches are exclusive, and you turn by partially reversing into the other branch.

 

 

a) If you make the stem 5m wide, someone will feel free to park on it because 2.5m will be left, which is enough to drive down. Technically,  they could argue that because a second car can fit past the parked car, the parking does not form a substantive obstruction of the Right of Way -> so design it such that it damnw ell would be a substantive obstruction.

 

So if you make it 3m wide, someone will probably not park on it, because it is blatantly obvious that it will be a blockage, as only a pushbike to a motorbike could get past. A bloody-minded sod might park on it, but most people would not, and a it is clear-cut enough that a normal policeman or PCSO would make them move. Doesn't solve the problem, but does tend to make it rarer if you are forced to have a shared area.

 

So make the shared entrance as narrow as is consistent with domestic uses. That is a combination of physical design and human psychology.

 

(You may run up against Fire Engines requiring 3.7m if any part of either house is more than 45m from the roadway - so make it all within the distance). 

 

b) Each half also requires to be able to reverse into the other house's branch of the Y by about 3m to turn around, so need a right of way over that for turning purposes, and for the other householder not to park on it.

 

If the driveway gate is set 3m back from the split in the drive on each side (or a big white line put on the drive, or a change of surface, or similar), then there is physically not room to park nearly all cars there without obstructing access from the other branch of the Y. Again, a bloody-minded sod could park there, but most people (hopefully) would not. 

 

A Right of Way in the deeds would make that enforceable, or if you really wanted to be clear give A the freehold of the first 3.5m of B's drive from the split in the Y, and vice-versa, and corresponding Rights of Way to allow access.

 

6 That is the sort of scheme I was thinking about. 

 

Needs thought, but corresponding setups should be designable. It will not guarantee reasonable behaviour, but it will incentivise it to some extent.

You need to be a little ingenious.
 

Ferdinand

(will add diagram when I have sketched)

Edited March 24, 2019 by Ferdinand