No I didn't mean that.
I was replying to your question about the legal requirement of the BSI Standards.
The courts decide on an individual basis whether people/businesses have breached the Equality Act; by working to the standards and practices laid out in the BSI Code of Practice for the design of buildings and their approaches to meet the needs of disabled people, you are unlikely to be found in breach of the Equality Act.

As you are so good at this google stuff, does the BSI Code of Practice make any mention of Blue Badges?

Why not look it up for yourself?

Oh, the facility management can get a car moved if required, they put it out over the tannoy. But anyway, why is this any different to a normal operating practice, why ask the question ?
When you say looking for problems when there aren`t any, I suppose it depends what you mean. There are car parks which are full and unused disabled spaces, as in never used. You could say that isn`t a problem, but that would depend on your definition of a problem. If you`re a non blue badge holder driving round trying to find a space that is a problem.

I don`t think you`ve quite understood the point of this thread. I`m saying that the planning guidelines are not necessarily correct. In fact I proved it.

I`ve been thinking about the research problem and how to get over it. How do the management of any facility know for sure they`ve got enough disabled spaces without just over estimating and then wasting spaces ? I reckon the most efficient way would be to start with a number of spaces which they`re fairy sure would actually be used, then leave signs by the spaces saying that if there are ever no disabled spaces please inform the staff as soon as possible. A member of staff is sent down with some urgency to sort out a space for them and also check that is actually the case. If there are non blue badge holders in the spaces they are moved, but if the spaces actually are all taken by blue badge holders the management then classify some more spaces as disabled ASAP. Obviously, whilst the car park is being designed / built it would have to have a higher number of slightly wider spaces than it thinks it may actually need, but it doesn`t actually classify those as disabled till the need is proved.
I cannot think of a more accurate and efficient way of doing it.



This system would be just to confirm that there are a sufficient number of disabled spaces, neither a shortage nor an excess. So long as it`s efficiently carried out I wouldn`t have thought it`d be used very often after the first few months. Actually, I wouldn`t have thought it`d be used too often at all, excluding non blue badge holders using disabled spaces, but that`s an ongoing universal problem. I wouldn`t have thought the way round that is to hugely overprovide disabled spaces in the hope that there are still some over once all the selfish drivers (who want to) park in them. A far more efficient solution is efficient enforcement.

The only explanation you have given me is to quote the percentage of blue badge holders in the general population and extrapolate that. With all due respect that`s not the same thing at all as proving there is either a shortage or excess of disabled spaces. During the period of my research there was an excess.

If you want to get concrete evidence of the usage then my only recommendation is to sit in the car park 24x7 for a month or 3 and record the usage and produce some accurate stats (you can't argue with your own stats)

you can of course log cars and their usage patterns as well for both sets of people and then you will be able to present your plans to the centres owners who'll just tell you to f-off as it'll end up costing them 10's of thousands a year just to perhaps on a rain Thursday get a couple more non disabled cars into the park.

I don`t intend to repeat my study, I haven`t got the time and to some extent it`s pointless anyway, some people only believe what they want to believe, they won't let things like facts get in the way their certainty. But, whilst at Ponds Forge the other night, my sense of curiosity overcame me and I counted how many of the disabled bays had blue badge holders in them. Three, out of 15 disabled spaces.......

Here's my latest research:
I went to Sainsbury's on Friday they have 26 disabled spaces they were all filled and they all displayed blue badges.

But yours is a small sample, and not really facts. Now these are facts we having a growing population, but also have a aging population. The ageing population

Over the last 25 years the percentage of the population aged 65 and over increased from 15 per cent in 1983 to 16 per cent in 2008, an increase of 1.5 million people in this age group. Over the same period, the percentage of the population aged 16 and under decreased from 21 per cent to 19 per cent. This trend is projected to continue. By 2033, 23 per cent of the population will be aged 65 and over compared to 18 per cent aged 16 or younger.
The fastest population increase has been in the number of those aged 85 and over, the ’oldest old‘. In 1983, there were just over 600,000 people in the UK aged 85 and over. Since then the numbers have more than doubled reaching 1.3 million in 2008. By 2033 the number of people aged 85 and over is projected to more than double again to reach 3.2 million, and to account for 5 per cent of the total population.

indeed