IT’S A great relief to see bollards going up on the edge of the pavements lining the access road to Larnaca Airport. And one has not a little malicious pleasure in seeing the illegally parked cars suddenly sealed in (though disappointingly a temporary exit route has been left. Why? Owners should have been forced to pay exorbitant costs to have their cars winched out from the salt lake).
The action is long overdue. What a shabby first impression of Cyprus it gave to arriving visitors: rows of dusty cars, perched precariously on the pavements or slumped down on the adjacent bank of the salt lake, as if they had been abandoned, ruining the view onto one of the island’s most iconic landmarks, with its graceful pink flamingos and dreamy mosque nestled in an oasis of palm trees – a mirage plucked from the thousand and one nights vanishing behind the prosaic foreground of old Isuzu vans and battered saloons.
But beyond being an eyesore, the cars are a safety risk, often jutting out into the road, while they clog up the pavements that are made for pedestrians, forcing anyone wanting to take a stroll along the lake either onto the road or down into the scrub below.
One only wonders why it has taken so many years for the authorities to do anything about the situation. It is no more illegal to park there today than it was yesterday or a year or five ago. It has always been illegal and it has always been dangerous. So where were the police? After all, it’s not as if this was an isolated spot miles away from everything – the airport is 500m away. Would anyone dream of leaving their car on an approach road to Heathrow? It would be towed away within seconds, if not blown up by bomb squad officers!
Indeed, why do we need to spend €27,500 on bollards? Why did the police simply not go out every day placing parking tickets on the vehicles, or, even better since they are left there for weeks on end while their owners go on holiday, towing them away and charging a hefty fine to release them?
How long would it have taken for the message to get round that dumping your car on the pavement was not a free and convenient alternative to getting a taxi or paying for a car park? The pavements would have been empty within a month and the local authorities would have raked in a tidy sum instead of spending taxpayers’ money. (Fining each car €200, it would have taken just 137 cars to make up the €27,500 spent). It seems like common sense; but that may be too much to expect when police care so little to enforce any parking laws on any street in Cyprus. So let’s be grateful for small mercies.
