Thursday, August 23, 2012

Clearly, it doesn't pass the smell test!


It seems a UK company erected its new headquarters without bothering to provide parking for its workers, who promptly took over every space available in surrounding streets.  The locals weren't amused.  The Telegraph reports:

Families say they are fed up with staff from the giant AXA PPP Healthcare's headquarters in Hawkenbury, near Tunbridge Wells, Kent, taking all the spaces in nearby roads.

Now employees going home after work have returned to their cars to find them smeared with dog excrement.

. . .

There are only 250 on-site car spaces for around 550 people at the insurance firm's International House HQ, which opened in August last year.

AXA, Tunbridge Wells's biggest private employer, says 200 more staff are likely to be taken on over the next three to five years, but there will only be 34 more parking spaces.

There's more at the link.

I can't understand why AXA hasn't offered to build a parking garage for their workers' use, and install extra parking spaces.  Such incremental solutions would help to resolve local residents' excremental one!





Peter

3 comments:

Luke said...

Okay, cyberspace ate my message so I'll be brief.

1) normally the company had a certain number of parking spots that it negotiates with the local government for, so often adding more cant be helped.

2) employees could have made a deal with homeowners to pay to use their driveways etc

3) anyone who smears my car with excrement is asking for retaliation in kind in their mailbox. Possibly something fore fluid in this case.

Reason I bring up the local government is that this was the case of my uni, who only had so many spaces and ended up cutting back. They are allowed x number of of spaces per student. It sucked when they built the day care centre on out cat park, but not nearly as much for us as for our dental students who often had to stop halfway through four hour procedures to avoid getting tickets. Most of them ended up going to surrounding home owners and offering to paying to park on their lawns or driveways.

Cheers
Luan - Cairns, Australia

Anonymous said...

Maybe the goal is to force people to stop having cars.

Mad Jack said...

Luan - Cairns, Australia is right. The homeowners aren't thinking this one through. This is an opportunity to rent a little space for a while and quietly make a few bucks cash on the side. All you need to do is get up in the morning and open your driveway for business. Hey, at the end of the month count up the money in your mason jar and start hoping that the parking crises doesn't get solved for another year or two.