Welwyn Hatfield Council and Herts County Council are planning to ban all vehicles and in particular commercial vehicles from parking on pavements and verges in central Welwyn Garden City 24/7 using the new legislative powers announced by the government back in February. The engineer for the council said ‘Vehicles driving over and parking on footways and verges in these areas have been observed to cause damage to kerbs, paving slabs, soft verges and can cause obstruction and risk to pedestrians’ and ‘ the scheme would make parking or the loading/unloading of a vehicle on the footway or verge in these areas illegal.’
Great stuff, especially as Welwyn Garden City was designed with every road having wide grass verge with a central parkway which was once described as one of the world’s finest urban vistas! Indeed it still is very pretty as shown below, but do notice the car tracks across the verges in the foreground. Not major at present and possibly there are worse problems elsewhere, but it is best not to drive on a garden!
Parkway, Welwyn Garden City (copyright Google)
Pedestrian Liberation 
Great news, I hope they do go through with it. I have no doubt that there will be the usual barrage of complaints from the motoring lobby but it does appear that people are beginning to take notice of the fact that pavement parking is anti-social, and that pedestrians also have rights.