Association of British Drivers agrees with Herron. CPZ Order is required.

It appears as though the Sunderland ship is heading for the rocks. The following e-mail has been received from the Association of British Drivers:

Your message to the ABD's enquiry email address has been forwarded to the rest of the committee. As the ABD's traffic management specialist (with over 30 years' local authority service in highway and traffic engineering), it is probably most appropriate that I reply.

We have certainly been following the Sunderland case with interest. Having had a look through your website, I was not previously aware of the issue with taxi ranks, only the CPZ issue. As far as the latter is concerned, there is no doubt that a traffic regulation order is necessary to set one up. The purpose of a CPZ is to have a single, principal waiting restriction throughout the area, which can be signed at all the entry points, so that there is no need for individual signing of yellow lines. Only where a waiting restriction differed from the standard one for the CPZ would it need to be signed. This reduces the cost of installing and maintaining signs, as well as reducing unsightly sign clutter. This relaxation of the signing requirements is only legal if a TRO exists for the CPZ.

If a CPZ order has not been made but the individual waiting restrictions within it are covered by their own TROs, those TROs would still apply but would not be enforceable unless individual signing was in place. (In the case of double yellow lines, which for the last five years or so have only been permissible where a 24/7 restriction applies, no signs are required, so they may be enforceable anyway.)

To repeat again, and to keep it simple, Sunderland Council is operating a Controlled Parking Zone. There is no CPZ Order.

If they are reliant on previous orders they require the necessary individual signage for each of those orders. That individual signage is not in place.

When they changed the regime from criminalised to decriminalised the Secretary of State required that all the necessary Traffic Orders and signage were correct in order to create the Special Parking Area Order which would allow the initiation of the decriminalised regime.

It seems some one has been misinformed somewhere.