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Local Services is my attempt to bring together information from many sources and present them in a way I would like to see them.

Local Services

Car parking

My first foray into detailing Local Services is to do with car parking.

Car parking is generally provided, and policed by the designated Local Authority (LA) or more commonly known as the local council.

If you pay your council tax (which of course, you do, don't you?) then you know who your own LA outfit is, so you probably know where to go looking for car parking information. Writing multi-thousand pound cheques annually for your LA tends to make their name stick in your head.

However, if you have got to make a trip outside your own area, then the chances are that you do not know the name of the LA in charge of parking.

If you are out of luck you are likely to drive into an area who's LA sports a fancy name you will not even find on a map. This is one of the very odd and confusing things about LAs in the UK. A neutral name like the that of a geographical feature may have been chosen for political reasons, so as not to offend the people in a settlement.

If you are really out of luck you may drive into an area who LA consists of three 'tiers', a county council, a district or borough council and a town or parish council. Each of these 'tiers' may provide different parking services (though the parish councils tend to steer clear of this job).

Confused? Well you would not be alone, and hence I felt the need to create this Local Services website.

The big idea is that you pick the town or village you are visiting, this site magically displays information about that area. When taken together this information should help you to save some money, or time by showing you how to:

Hopefully you will also consider:

With a little bit of planning your trip as a whole could cost less in terms of cash and/or in CO2 emmisions.

Forewarned is forearmed - so there are also local press reports which may show positive things like days where parking is free, or just how even-handed the locals think their LA behaves. You should be aware that there will probably be a mixture of good and bad news articles, but lets face it many of the evocative parking headlines will deal with bad news. I am not responsible for their views.

The majority of the really useful information you will likely need is kept on the LA website, I simply show you the direct links to follow. You dont have to go hunting around their website to find it.

Status

June 10th 2009

Alpha #3 version launched - Parking in all LA areas of West Yorkshire. Direct links to where you should find information on a range of parking topics, council car parks, street parking and fines etc. You don't need to know which LA services a place, just pick a place by name.

May 22nd 2009

Alpha #2 version launched - Parking in the Kirklees Metropolitan Borough Council (MBC) area. Fundamentally it looks pretty much the same as before, but that disguises a lot of major changes.
SEO - I have added some basic RDFa tags following Google's announcement last week. I also paid a bit more attention to the words on the page, added proper descriptions etc in order to see how this affects SEO. I know this will always be work in progress.
Data storage and handling - the underlying structures now allow me to advance the idea both vertically (more councils) and horizontally (more subjects). Using a proper database now instead of just querying straight JSON files.
Logging - Far more advanced metrics gathering and a what I hope is a correctly thought-out and robust error and exception handling is in place, using PEAR::Log and the special sqlite_pdo enhancement that I created which just extends existing classes.

April 11th 2009

Alpha #1 version launched - Parking in the Kirklees Metropolitan Borough Council (MBC) area. I picked Kirklees at random because I just did not know where it was! I have no axe to grind with Kirklees MBC and in fact they seem to have lots of good parking information on their website showing numbers of parking bays and prices, very useful. I simply provide direct links to where you should find information on a range of parking topics, council car parks, street parking and fines etc.

Oustanding Issues

'Oustanding Issues' is just a fancy way of saying stuff thats broken, unfinished or still on my blossoming 'to do' list. It means you don't need to tell me about them, I am embarrassed enough about them, but I would rather put the site online than wait until achieving perfection. If you feel strongly about an issue you want me to deal with then tweet me.

Credits

It is difficult to say exactly which code I used for this site, most of it I wrote myself. However I am very much aware of the following elements, whose authors/maintainers I acknowledge and thank. I trust I have not broken their terms or conditions by using their work.

All other content on this site is copyright protected and you cannot re-use, or republish the content except for your own personal non-commercial use without my express written permission except where indicated.

I make no claims about the accuracy of any Local Services information given out from this site, you should contact the suppliers of the information directly before setting out on long journeys.