Carers and visiting vehicles

The other day I was reading Ed Davey’s impressive recent book “Why I care and why care matters” with its emphasis on the way family members put in a great deal of unpaid (and often unrecognised) time and effort to care for people who need it.  In Ed’s case, it was first himself caring as a boy for his own mother and nowadays caring for his own disabled son.  In cases more familiar to me, it is grandparents helping out their own children who need help as parents themselves.  This connected in my mind with the recent dialogue many ladder residents had with the council about visitor parking permits.  In that consultation, I made the point that while it is perfectly sensible to allow parking privileges for professional carers, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that many visits to or from ladder houses are likely to be unpaid family carers and that these can be just as important as visits by professional carers.

In our household we have a car and a resident permit.  Every Monday and Tuesday the car is used to make a journey to and from a grandchild’s home and/or school and/or nursery, perhaps twice if a child spends part of the day with us.

The car might be used once or twice more on other days which means that our household contributes about 12 vehicle movement per week to our street.  When deliveries to our house are counted too, we would seem to be about average for a ladder house.  Before I retired, the number would have been smaller, since I never drove to work and my then wife often rode a bicycle with a toddler on the back.  That isn’t a practical option at our age (and with grandkids in pairs) so, as long as family care remains part of this household’s life, vehicle movements will have to remain too and they should not be equated with vehicles simply passing through.