Bedford council trialling pavement charging gullies for electric vehicles

Last night’s Climate Change Committee (Monday, March 17) heard that Bedford Borough Council is running a trial of charging channels for electric vehicle owners who only have on-street parking.

Councillor Jim Weir (Conservative, Great Denham) said “lots and lots of people” have been putting the cables over pavements.

“Trying to tape things down and put patches over them and it’s been a bit of a problem,” he said.

Andrew Prigmore, manager for traffic operations, said: “The purpose of the trial is to determine the ease of installation, durability of the channel, if there’s any problems with the channel.

“One thing that may come up, and it’s a concern to other councils, is if you pay for a channel and somebody parks in front of your channel, how do you resolve that?

“The highway is open to all, we don’t reserve particular places for gullies,” he said.

Councillor Nicola Gribble (Independent, Renhold and Ravensden) said: “It could be a blooming nightmare.

“Just knowing [about] the trouble we have with parking, it could land up being fisticuffs at dawn,” she said.

Councillor Robert Rigby (Conservative, Bromham) said: “The moment you start charging people to go across the public footpath, those people effectively go to claim ownership of that particular channel.

“That’s where the problem I think is going to arise.”

Mr Prigmore said councils such as Oxford who are a lot further forward in running trials of this option “don’t seem to have this problem”.

“If residents get together and say look this is what I’m doing, this is what we would like to do, they tend to leave those spaces free,” he said.

“As it rolls out it’s potentially going to be more of an issue.

“So it’s one of those suck it and see, if you like.”

Mr Prigmore added that it is made clear when signing up that there’s no guarantee the parking space will be available.

“So [they] are signing up in the knowledge that space could potentially be unavailable for charging,” he said.