A decision by the Environment Department to test the water on whether to remove the small number of on-road disc parking spaces in Grande Rue, St Martin’s, has actually set it something of a dilemma.

What triggered this interest in the section of thoroughfare was some recent roadworks which, unusually, led to improved traffic flows.

With the department’s customary bureaucratic rigour, the Traffic and Transport Services division pondered whether those gains should be banked and made permanent. After all, the reasoning went (and not many people knew this) it is Guernsey’s only designated traffic priority route.

Whether the department was surprised by the instant ‘leave things as they are’ response or not, it very quickly decided to extend the formal consultation deadline from 6 July to 1 August and it is clear that there is no shortage of views on the matter.

One of the issues, of course, is that the yellow line opposite the Green Hut snack shack is used by its customers as handy priority parking for the hungry and there is no doubt that that and the authorised parking do make negotiating this stretch of Grande Rue trickier than perhaps it strictly should be.

That said, St Martin’s is one of the few real community centres left in the island and the disc parking does facilitate trips to the dentist or chiropodist and, for the elderly, can reduce the walk from the main parking area towards La Route des Camps.

So on the one hand, there is an opportunity for Environment to significantly improve traffic flows and the speed with which vehicles pass through the island’s only priority route while, on the other hand, materially changing (for the worst) the use people make of their local environment.

Almost irrespective of the comments it receives, Environment’s political board needs to be mindful of the benefits that would flow from the removal of the parking spaces versus the harm – in the sense of making the daily grind even worse – it would cause.

Perhaps this is one of the rare occasions where the law does not prevent Environment from applying common sense.