Streets Ahead

Our Streets Ahead Campaign is focused on making streets and outdoor public places more accessible for people living with a visual impairment. The campaign encompasses three main areas: Shared Surfaces, Pavement Parking and Street Clutter. 

Pavement Parking

Pavements are meant for people. When cars are parked on them, that safe space disappears. People with sight loss may be forced into the road to get past or blocked altogether, along with wheelchair users, older people, and people with pushchairs. Pavement parking reduces independence and makes our streets less safe and less accessible for everyone.

Pavement parking is consistently highlighted as one of the key challenges people with sight loss face day to day.

• 95% of people with sight loss say they’ve been forced to walk in the road, and one in five say they’ve been injured as a result of a pavement-parked car.

Being forced into the road even once is dangerous. But being regularly blocked from getting from A to B safely has a real impact on people’s ability to live and work independently. 81% of people with sight loss said that reducing obstacles on pavements was important to improving their quality of life.

However, across much of the UK, local councils don’t have the powers they need to tackle the problem.

That’s why we’ve been pushing for change, and after decades of campaigning, we’ve recently made real progress.

• A new law is being rolled out in Scotland, and in late 2025 and early 2026, plans to create more powers to tackle pavement parking were announced in both Northern Ireland and England.

These incoming changes are thanks to the support of thousands of campaigners, who raised awareness of the dangers of pavement parking and contacted their representatives.

Laws on pavement parking across the UK

Pavement parking has been prohibited in London since 1974, except in designated areas, and a similar law is being implemented across Scotland. January 2026 marked two years of enforcement in Edinburgh and local authorities across Scotland are now following the city’s lead. We’re working with councils across Scotland and calling on them to use their powers to manage parking in their areas.

Outside of London and Scotland, it’s not a specific offence to park on the pavement in most instances. Local leaders’ powers to act on pavement parking are limited, involving lengthy and complex processes.

While causing an obstruction can be ticketed by the police, most police forces don’t have the resources to adequately manage pavement parking day-to-day.

In 2025, Northern Ireland’s Department for Infrastructure announced plans for new rules that will prohibit parking fully on pavements, blocking dropped kerbs, and double parking.

The Department for Transport in England announced proposals in 2026 to allow councils to decide how to tackle the issue – to prohibit or restrict pavement parking on a wider scale and put exemptions in place as needed.

While we continue to call for change in Wales, we’re working to ensure that reforms in Scotland are rolled out effectively. In Northern Ireland and England, we are working to ensure that proposed reforms will deliver meaningful change for people with sight loss.

What can I do about pavement parking in my area?

Shared Surfaces

Shared surface streets (sometimes called a level surface) are where the road and pavement are built at the same level, removing the kerb so that cars, buses, cyclists and pedestrians share the same surface. In some cases, controlled crossings (pelican crossings) are also removed.

Shared surface streets are dangerous for people with a vision impairment, who rely upon the presence of the kerb to know they are on the pavement and not in the road.

The shared surface concept is intended to be a way to provide:

• an attractive street environment with slower traffic
• less street clutter
• a people friendly space

Guide Dogs has been campaigning against the use of shared surface streets as part of our Streets Ahead campaign, supported by organisations representing disabled people across the disability sector, older people and other groups.

 Key concerns for people living with sight loss:

• You have to make eye contact 
  
  Pedestrians, motorists and cyclists have to make eye contact to decide who moves first. This obviously compromises the safety, independence and confidence of people living with a vision impairment.
• People rely on the kerb
  
  People with a vision impairment, particularly guide dog owners and long cane users, use the kerb as a navigation tool to know where they are in a street.

As a result, many people with sight loss, disabled and elderly people have said that they feel unable to use the shared surface street in their town. People with learning difficulties, people who are deaf or hearing impaired, older people and young children can also experience difficulty with shared surface streets.

Street Clutter

Guide Dogs research shows that 97% of people with a vision impairment have problems with street clutter, such as shop advertising signs (A-Boards) and street cafe furniture, which are littered across the pavement.

A clearer high street, where obstacles like A-boards and cafe furniture are placed consistently, leaving plenty of room for pedestrians to walk past, not only makes it a safer place for people with sight loss, but also a nicer, more inviting place for all shoppers. We are campaigning for tidier, more accessible streets. 

Why we are campaigning

Although to some people these issues may not seem particularly bad, shared surfaces, pavement parking and street clutter all make the lives of people living with a vision impairment harder. For some it can be just another reason to stay at home. All our campaigns strive to end the isolation people with vision impairment feel and aim to make the world a more accessible place, which is why we are campaigning for cleaner, easier street navigation as part of Streets Ahead.