Shared drive with neighbours - Am I not allowed to block my own half of the drive?

feathers12

I'm not sure why I'm so interested in this thread, might be that some neighbour from down the road has parked / left his car on my drive today. But hey I'm intrigued. 

Not sure why I did this but I made a clipart-y version of your drawing. Bit of question seems to be how your visitors park along the drop kerb / length of kerb. This is how I am imagining it based on the posts - is this right?
Grey hatched section being where the kerb is dropped

oldbikebloke

feathers12 said:

I'm not sure why I'm so interested in this thread, might be that some neighbour from down the road has parked / left his car on my drive today. But hey I'm intrigued. 

Not sure why I did this but I made a clipart-y version of your drawing. Bit of question seems to be how your visitors park along the drop kerb / length of kerb. This is how I am imagining it based on the posts - is this right?
Grey hatched section being where the kerb is dropped

yes, OP has confirmed in a post several pages back that the dropped kerb spans both his and his neighbours frontage. He only has the right hand riser, and his neighbour has the left hand riser (and lamppost). 

the answer to his question was given on page 1.
He has no right to park across (block) his own drop, and could get a parking ticket for doing so - which may, in practice, be rescinded if he appealed and proved it was his own access that he was obstructing. It is not his "drive" to park across, he remains (at least partly) on the public highway. What he has is a council granted right of passage between highway edge ("kerb") and his own plot boundary, but not a right to either block or park on since the space in between is still pavement which is technically more properly called a "crossover" section and should/will have been reinforced to cope with the weight of traffic across it.
. 
The fact that by so doing it makes it less easy for his neighbour to enter their off road parking is a matter of conscience, nothing more or less. Summarised as either lack of consideration by the OP or inability to drive by the neighbour - take your pick.

The law (for now, it is under review) does not make it an offence to park on a pavement - except in "London" where it is a specific offence. Outside London you could be done for dangerous obstruction, but not pavement parking per se. Patently you would have to be going some to get done for obstruction https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51844446

mr_stripey

feathers12 said:

I'm not sure why I'm so interested in this thread, might be that some neighbour from down the road has parked / left his car on my drive today. But hey I'm intrigued. 

Not sure why I did this but I made a clipart-y version of your drawing. Bit of question seems to be how your visitors park along the drop kerb / length of kerb. This is how I am imagining it based on the posts - is this right?
Grey hatched section being where the kerb is dropped

unbelievable - BUT whilst not wanting to hijack the thread I am reminded of an incident a few years ago when my friend and I visited a mate in Muswell Hill. We drove down on the Friday (he drove) and parked on a residential street a little way away from my mate's flat and left it at that. Neither one of us noticed at the time that we'd blocked someones drive.

Fast forward to Sunday morning and whilst my friend was taking his time to get ready to leave I offerred to walk up and fetch the car. 
As I got in the car I noticed a note on the window. It only took a split second to read the colourful language and quickly realise that my mate had parked over this (clearly angry) guy's drive. Reasoning that he would be unlikley to believe my defence of "it wasn't me that parked here" whilst being in the drivers seat of the offending car, I figured the best course of action would be to flee very quickly. Rapidly entering the car, starting it and driving off in one smooth movement, I looked in the mirror and saw said gentleman - who could best be described as "a unit" running down the road, shirtless and waving his fist. 

I can laugh about it now, but at the time the realistic possibility of being throttled by some hard nut in a quiet street on a Sunday morning was quite scary!

mr_stripey

btw if you're reading this and you are a large shaven headed resident of Muswell Hill who got your drive blocked for a whole weekend by a silver Vauxhall Astra estate - I'm really sorry, it was my mate's fault!

Silvertabby

mr_stripey said:

btw if you're reading this and you are a large shaven headed resident of Muswell Hill who got your drive blocked for a whole weekend by a silver Vauxhall Astra estate - I'm really sorry, it was my mate's fault!

If he really was that much of a hard nut he and his mates would have 'bumped' the Astra into the middle of the road ! 

MoneySeeker1

muffingg said:

RobM99 said:

Reverse the situation, would you be happy?

I wouldn't say anything if there is enough space in front of my drive to get my car in. It's definitely wide enough to get it in, although it would take 5-10 seconds extra because of the space being tight. If my neighbours get guests every now and then, I wouldn't mind if they obstruct their half of the driveway and their car isn't sticking out beyond their house boundary.

But this is where you are going wrong in your thinking right from the start.

You personally in your personal car might not have a problem with this. BUT - and I know it sounds sexist - I am in a position where I have neighbours that are parking illicitly where they absolutely should not do so (in a somewhat different context). 

From that - most male drivers get told about selfish neighbours mucking up access by me and manage to deal with it in their vehicles (all the way through from tiny car up to mega-size lorry) on the one hand. But, on the other hand, I do know most of my female friends struggle with Selfish Neighbour parking where they should NOT do so and thus making life more difficult for them to access my house and I am not a happy bunny that Selfish Neighbour is mucking things up. I've also found that mega-size lorries (always been a male driver to date) struggle unnecessarily to access my house because of Selfish Neighbour and it depends a lot on how frequent/confident a driver is whether they can manage to do so and I am not happy about having to point out every time exactly what neighbours are allowed to do v. what the Selfish Neighbour is getting up to and my own personal solution is to tell the driver concerned to bang on Selfish Neighbours door and they will have my full backing on that.

People do vary in their driving skills and, just because you personally can handle Selfish Neighbours making life unnecessarily difficult, does not mean that other people can (or anyone is entitled to expect them to put themselves out to try to).

MoneySeeker1

muffingg said:

numbercruncher8 said:

Would it just not be easier to tell your guests to park somewhere else?

I visit someone with a similar set up, except that the dropped kerb runs double length, and there is no lamp-post. I don't park on half of the dropped kerb and think it's a bit disrespectful to the neighbours. There is ample space for the neighbours car to enter/leave the drive if I parked there, but I am mindful with my car there they would have to take a tighter turn into the drive, or restricts their view when leaving.

Ideally, I always try that my guests park as much to the right side as possible. But this isn't always possible because the road I live on has very few parking spaces (everyone has off-street parking) and the nearest space to park is often a good few minute walk away and my parents can't walk much. I would've thought it's no issue if they block the front of my own house. Surely the only person to complain about that is me as it's my house. And if I give permission to them to do so, it's no problem for anyone is it? The neighbours are just unlucky with the lamppost being there but that's not really our fault. Their workaround is to take a few seconds extra and squeeze into their drive still relatively comfortably. But they're making a fuss out of it...

Interesting....that you apparently didn't view the house before you bought it - and therefore had no idea there was a lamppost bang in the middle of access from your neighbours drive.

Lesson for future reference being - go and have a house viewing (or two) before you buy a house - rather than finding out about the "lay of the land" after buying the house with absolutely no viewings of it in advance.

iwb100

I don’t think the legalities of this matter - who in their right mind would ask guests to park there and make it difficult for neighbours to enter and exit their drive? The last thing I’d want to do.

warby68

If your parents are coming, move one of your cars.
Everyone happy (well, except you judging by the thread)
Making access difficult (even though not impossible) is simply not very neighbourly. Sometimes, even if you are entitled to do something or can get away with doing so does not mean that you should. Your right to convenience (for your parents) isn't greater than your neighbour's as you are talking about public road/pavement and not your drive from what I can gather.

greatcrested

Mickey666 said:

The answer to the question posed by the OP is contained within the thread title.
The OP doesn’t have ‘HALF a driveway’ to block, he has a half share of the WHOLE driveway - a subtle difference, perhaps, but an important one.  Both owners have a half share of the WHOLE driveway and therefore both of them have equal rights over the WHOLE driveway.  If the driveway was split into two halves there would be no need for either half to have shared ownership and each side could have TOTAL ownership of their respective ‘halves’.  For whatever reason, this is not the case, and the key thing is that joint ownership means just that, for every square metre, square centimetre and square millimetre.

That is really not certain.

OP said that the boundary on their Land Registry Plans runs down the centre of the drive meaning they each own half the drive.

Whether they have Rights of Way over their neighbour's half has not yet been clarified.

The use of the term 'shared drive' is almost certainly lay usage, not legal - though that too has to be clarified.

Until the OP examines his and his neighbour's property Titles properly, the only really valid responses are those relating to courtesy and diplomacy, and the debate over the dropped kerb.

The legal rights (or otherwise) to drive over each other's 'share' of the drive has yet to be confirmed.