Plans to remove parking some on-street parking in Edinburgh to make more space for pedestrians have been reported by Midlothian View and STV News with mixed reactions; Midlothian View notes that “a variety of studies have found that improving pedestrian and cycling provisions in town centres can have a positive commercial impact”, while STV news carries a quote from the Federation for Small Business, assuming that it may cause an issue for some businesses with customers “across or outside of the city”.

road.cc reports on how vehicles parked in their cycle lanes have been described by Twitter user LiverpoolWanderer as “pop-up parking”, and the council’s promise to deal with it.

Several places have seen unusually high levels of penalties issued in coastal areas, including East Lothian (East Lothian Courier) and Bournemouth (itv)

Forest of Dean Council has free parking on Saturdays until 01 September, as reported by Punchline Gloucester. ukparking view: Free parking isn’t what the high street needs, and it’s telling that “the council has said it cannot subsidise parking indefinitely” as free parking has a cost, and is a subsidy for drivers. Parking costs money to provide and uses space that could be used for other things – giving it away free severely undervalues it.

Meanwhile, Bradford council are extending grace periods for overstaying pay-and-display parking, as reported by strayfm. ukparking view: This is a more sensible idea, as this is an attempt to solve the problem of being delayed as people can’t reliably predict how long queues they aren’t used to will be. I am worried by the headline, though, as people will read the headline and may assume it applies more broadly than it does.