A nation divided: are you tickled pink or seeing red?

Ignore the terrible colour puns, but we’d be telling a white lie if we said we didn’t smirk whilst writing it.

Last week we had drivers versus e-scooters. This week it’s a bright pink van.

Yep, you read that correctly. A pink coloured van in Stoke-on-Trent has divided the nation on where it should be parked – and its colour.

Now, we’re all for colourful vans, to be honest. Perhaps, the brighter, the better? But that doesn’t mean we look down our noses at a neutral palette. We show no prejudice to any van and its paintwork colour here…

However, some of you have declared a worker’s van sporting a rather dashing bright pink colour, to be a ‘monstrosity’. So much so, that neighbours have been leaving notes on the windscreen, asking for it to be parked elsewhere. We only wish we could state they were polite notes.

Are we looking through rose-tinted glasses at this situation?

We’ve seen several brightly coloured vans in our time; from sunshine yellow to boastful oranges, sky blue to royal purple. Some would argue their eye-catching presentation is a positive tool for advertising. After all, you’re a lot more likely to stare and pay attention to a fluorescent pink van, than a bleak grey one. 

The worker, who had parked the unsightly considered van on his street, faced criticism for not having it outside his own home. However, his reasoning seemed just: he didn’t want to congest his street, and felt he’d parked it in the best place to avoid this. His neighbours, feeling the van was an eyesore, considered the reason to be a pitiful excuse. 

And so, the pink van has divided the nation. In colour, and parking position.

Would you leave a (not so polite) note, or speak with the man himself? The comments section (scroll down to the bottom) might leave you feeling blue, or perhaps you might be a green-eyed monster and want a shocking pink van yourself. 

If you’re considering updating the paintwork on your van – to a lovely snowy white or loud lime green – we don’t judge.

However, we do judge van insurance deals, and if they’re not cheap, we don’t want to know about it. Thankfully, we’ve collected all the best deals right here. Fill in the form and see for yourself!

Parking – a Van Drivers Biggest Waste of Time.

A new study by Vanarama shows that the UK white van delivery fleet is somewhat in crisis. (Tell us something we don’t already know).

We can all relate to the continual difficulty in finding places to park while we drop off our deliveries. But, as traffic and the parking situation worsens across the UK, the pressure on delivery drivers to make more deliveries each day has grown to a whopping expected daily delivery rate of 150 parcels per van. 

In the UK, 5.82 million small businesses depend on van drivers to deliver to them or on behalf of them to get their work done. With 1.2 million parking spaces in the UK, there are 3.24 million van drivers needing to use them (let’s not forget about regular road users too). The maths simply doesn’t stack up.

The report shows that over half a million of you struggle to find parking, typically taking over 20 minutes to find a spot to park for each delivery and in total, you each waste around 1 hour 40 minutes of each day in the hunt for somewhere to park your van. This costs the UK economy over £76 billion each year. Many drivers frequently risk parking tickets simply because they don’t have time to find an alternative option, with the pressure to get those deliveries done. And for those that do find somewhere legal to park, quite often, the space isn’t big enough for their van to fit, an issue now shared by many car drivers, thanks to the popularity of large 4×4 vehicles. 

If you take the number of van users in the UK (3.25 million), and the time it takes to park them each day, that adds up to combined 6.99 billion (yes, billion) hours wasted each year, looking for parking. 

So, what’s the solution? Well, as the study concludes, the fact is that more commercial vehicle parking needs to be created up and down the country, particularly in high street locations. But who is going to do it? What is really needs is one or two forward-thinking towns to step up and create the spaces and prove that doing so has a positive impact on illegal parking, congestion and pollution. Only then will there be a case for others to follow suit.

Van Driver Fined £5000 for Parking in his Own Driveway

There are many places that van drivers can get fined for parking, but in your own driveway is not somewhere you would expect to get a ticket.

Unfortunately though, this is exactly what has happened to van driver Dave Tooke, who over the last two years received 53 parking tickets that total £5000 in fines, despite being parked in his own driveway.

Just what is going on here? It was only a few weeks ago I reported on how van drivers were being stopped from buying new houses because the building companies don’t want them parking their vehicle in the neighbourhoods..well, it now seems that van drivers can’t park anywhere.

Thousands of ordinary van drivers are being stopped from parking their vehicles, and if you ask me it just isn’t on. Something needs to be done, even if it means getting a petition started so that politicians and local councils will stand up and take notice. I for one, would sign it.

This all comes at a time of course that van insurance is also becoming more expensive. There isn’t a day that goes by without people contacting me complaining about how their premiums are £200, £400, and even £500 more expensive than last year, and to those people I say…always compare van insurance, and don’t be loyal to any insurance company because they don’t deserve your loyalty.

Fortunately, it only takes about 3 minutes to fill in the form on this very site, and then once you click send your details are sent off to hundreds of the van insurance companies. This is what I suggest every van driver in the UK does if they want to save money.

Back to the parking situation and it appears that Dave Tooke has been living in his £400,000 3 bed house for 4 years now, and for the first 2 years he didn’t have any problems at all, parking his van on the driveway in front of his house.

The last 2 years has been a different story though, and its been problem after problem according to Dave with fines coming left, right and centre from people in authority that just don’t want him to park his van on the estate.

It really does seem that van drivers are being singled out here. Who knows why exactly, but there are many people out there who don’t want tradesmen living in their area.

At the end of the day, Dave can afford the £400,000 house, so he really should not have to deal with this. If the real estate company didn’t want van owners living on the estate then they should have communicated that when he bought the house…not 2 years later.

They were fine taking his £400,000 it would appear, but now they have forgotten all about that. I’ve said before that when things are going well these building and real estate companies get a bit too choosy.

Hopefully Dave can get this whole situation sorted out, and just be left alone to park his van on the property that he paid for.

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