Why do people have garden gates?

[Tim Watts]

Keep the dog in?

[Bruce Farquhar]

Train the dog instead?

[DerbyBorn]

But do the planners try to accept that people like to park out front? No!

[Bruce Farquhar]

I don't understand this parking at the back nonsense. Is this council estates we're talking about? They mostly seem to have been built before the car was invented. They have stupid systems where everyone parks in the middle of a square of houses, but the front doors are on the outside. So a postman walks round the outside to post through the letterboxes on the front doors, which are on a path. But if a courier wants to deliver something, he either has to run 200 yards round the outside of the block from where he parked, or go through their private back garden and knock on the back door, shocking the naked woman who just got out of the shower.

In civilised places like my street, you access the house from the front, where the road is, where the front door with the letterbox is, where the driveway is. The back garden does not have an exit, it borders onto the back garden of the house in the next street, with a fence or hedge to seperate them. Cars do not park on the road apart from buses/taxis/postmen. Your own car lives in your drive or garage where it belongs.

[Bruce Farquhar]

Why don't you have a guide dog? If I was blind there's no way I'd venture outside without assistance. There's only so much that your hearing and a white stick can tell you about your surroundings. How do you avoid stepping in dog shit for example? And I wonder if guide dogs steer the blind around that?

[Bruce Farquhar]

Buses are the root cause of most annoyances on the road. They're too slow and too big.

[Steve Walker]

Ours is somewhat like that, but my wife's car lives on the road outside. The driveway is only long enough for one car and access along the side of the house, while useable for my kit-car or trailer, is too narrow for everyday use - involving inching though with mirrors folded!

We are lucky, many houses only have access 3' to 4' wide to the back garden. The houses were built in 1934/35 and cars weren't a consideration.

SteveW

[Bruce Farquhar]

I would never have bought a house like that. I like my cars on my own property. My drive holds 5, plus 1 in the garage (if I hadn't converted it). I've only ever owned up to 3 cars at once. Owning a car without space to put it is like buying a computer motherboard with no case to hold it in and just leaving it running on the floor.

[Dave Liquorice]

Or the sheep/cattle out when they are being moved along the road.

[Muddymike]

Mine are to keep the dog safely on our property.

Mike

[S Viemeister]

Yes.

[Steve Walker]

If you want to live in the area, that's generally what you get unless you are very well off. Anyway, when I bought the house, I was single and my only plans for a second vehicle were for a motorbike.

SteveW

[Bruce Farquhar]

Then don't live in that area, it's obviously shit. It's akin to buying something very expensive from Harrods instead of going to Aldi.

There's nothing worse than a lack of forward planning - Microsoft etc do it all the time. Oh we'll never need more than 640K of RAM....

[Steve Walker]

As I've lived in the area all my life and my wife grew up here, it makes sense to stay in an area we are happy with, near friends and family. It makes life both nicer and easier - easy to drop round for a visit and on-hand to help out when needed ... which works both ways. It is an area with easy motorway connections for working anywhere within a pretty large area - hence not a cheap, run-down area.

SteveW

[Bruce Farquhar]

I've never understood relatives wanting to stay where they are. My family have moved all over the country (form London to the Highlands). The invention of the motor car allows visits when desired, and also allows you to be away from them!

Anyway, I'm sure you wouldn't have to travel more than 30 miles to find a cheaper/nicer/bigger area.

[Steve Walker]

We can live perfectly separately 3/4 of a mile apart and not see each other for weeks, but also be able to drop in while passing or phone up half way through some work for a helping hand or to borrow a specific tool that'd make it easier. When the children were younger, we could decide to go out shopping, phone to see if it was convenient and drop them off within a few minutes, rather than dragging them around with us when they didn't want to be there. My parents can be round with a few minutes notice if I am already at work and my wife is not well enough that morning to get the youngest to school - she has a chronic illness that severely limits her at times.

Family and friends provide a support network and you provide supposrt for them. Why would you want to throw that away by living further away?

Cheaper - yes, nicer - a little, bigger - possibly. Combinations of those no. Certainly not with the same easy transport links. Currently 15 minutes to travel 12 miles to work (where there are dozens of companies within my profession), but with major problems on a regular basis coming from the other directions. We are perfectly positioned so that for almost all of my working life (at many places, as I am a contractor), I have travelled the opposite way to the bulk of the traffic at both ends of the day.

SteveW

[Bruce Farquhar]

It depends how you get on with your relatives. Some people want to be sure they won't just turn up!

[Bruce Farquhar]

I be talking about towns, not country areas.

[Bruce Farquhar]

I see more gates than dogs.