Complaints against car drivers
PPAA Committee have recently received complaints – from more than one plot holder – of cars driving over part of their plots in order to save care when turning off the spine road and onto side tracks. Understandably, these gardeners have taken steps to stop this, by placing posts or other objects on their plots to cause drivers to be more considerate. It’s quite shocking to hear then, that these drivers have apparently destroyed these fixtures, throwing them aside, to enable them to drive over other people’s gardens.
This is simply wilful damage, and if traced, then the perpetrators risk prosecution, and also the loss of their allotment tenancies.
Vehicles are accepted onto PPA site, but that absolutely does not mean that drivers have an unqualified right to access their plots by such means, even if that entails driving over someone else’s. There is no such right stated in the Tenancy Agreement.
Complaints by car drivers
We now come to the other side of this coin.
It’s a condition of tenancy that the occupants of a plot don’t cause nuisance to any other Council property, or injury or obstruction to any track or path. It has to be said that there are too many plots, which adjoin trackways, where the tenant has allowed vegetation – whether crops or weeds – to overhang the trackway, or to grow in the cracks between edgings, in accumulations of leaf mould, and so on. PPAA’s understanding is that where a plot adjoins such a track, its tenant is expected to keep the edgings weed-free (this applies whether or not the tenant has erected rabbit fencing etc., which they might claim to be the boundary of their plot – it isn’t). Now, it seems that where people have failed to do this, aggrieved drivers may have resorted to self-help. Whatever, as long as they don’t harm any crops or anything else on the actual body of the plot, then without more, they have done no particular wrong in so doing either.
Here are some examples of properly-maintained edgings, and of some which aren’t.
It isn’t just car drivers who need clear trackways. Nor do pedestrians and cyclists want to be hurt by injurious thorns, or by other nasty things projecting into their way.
Let’s all be considerate.
PPA Website Team (striving, as ever, for balance)
