Hate to dissolution you Fat Andy, but this problem with inconsiderate parking is nothing out of the ordinary. Every weekend is the same, the access to our garage, car space and car park is blocked by cars lined up down the narrow lane, two wheels on the pavement, two in the road way. Our neighbour even had some cheeky soul parked in his own private car park. The police won't shift them, so we have to abandon the idea of using our car at weekend.
Parking on pavements isn't (currently) an offence so unfortunately nobody can do anything about it. Driving on a pavement is an offence so presumably if the police saw someone driving onto a pavement with the intention of parking there they could take action but once the car has stopped there's nothing they can do. There was a MP called Martin Horwood who was trying to pass a bill through Parliament that would have made pavement parking an offence but he was a Lib Dem who lost his seat in the election so we can only hope his bill survives without him. Parking on private land is a civil offence so again there's nothing the police can do about that.
In the case of my in-laws they live in a cul-de-sac which has a road wide enough for two cars leading up to it. There were already cars parked up one side of the road when some moron came along and tried on the other side, completely blocking access not just for my in-laws but also all the other residents of the cul-de-sac. This was of particular concern to us because a few years ago my father in law had a massive heart attack and at one point was given half an hour to live. He somehow survived (the doctors didn't know how) and now has a defibrilator fitted but his heart is now only working to 20% of it's capacity so if anything had happened it would have been difficult to get an ambulance through to the house. The time taken to smash the windows of the cars in question to enable someone to reach in and release the handbrakes might have made the difference between live and death.
Perhaps we should all write to our MP (we all know how tirelessly he works in the interests of his constituents
) and ask him to pick up Mr Horwood's old bill and see it through to fruition.
Hopefully in the meantime someone at Conwy Council will issue a proper roasting to the (dis)organisers of the event and ensure that in future they put proper stewarding in place to at least try to mitigate some of the chaos they caused yesterday.