Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

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Jim606
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by Jim606 »

The Colchester P&R has come in for a lot of mixed reviews since it first opened. Basically, it isn't meeting the estimated forecasts in terms of passenger numbers and pay back from the initial investment. There has been some discussion about adding extra stops at the hospital / nearer the town centre and extending the hours of operation / pricing structures etc. but, it still seems to be struggling. In February 2016 some travellers took up residence at the site. At least they are finding a use for the banks of used spaces and to some extent can you blame them?
Travellers at Colchester's P&R in February 2016 photo c/o Steve Argent Colchester Gazette / Essex County Standard
Travellers at Colchester's P&R in February 2016 photo c/o Steve Argent Colchester Gazette / Essex County Standard
http://www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/loca ... _and_Ride/
Travellers have pitched up at Colchester's Park and Ride car park. Eight caravans arrived at the car park off junction 28 of the A12, near the Weston Homes Community Stadium, around midday on Wednesday. Police attended the site today following complaints some of the travellers allegedly harassed park and ride customers. Colchester Council is also monitoring the situation.
A council spokesman said: "We have been advised that there is an unauthorised encampment of travellers at Colchester’s Park & Ride site." This land is owned by Essex County Council. Essex Countywide Traveller Unit visited the site on Thursday 25th February and has served ‘direction to leave’ notices. 'If, after 24 hours following notice served, the travellers do not leave the site, court action will be taken to ensure their removal. If a court order is necessary, the procedure will take between seven to ten days. The police will visit the unauthorised encampment and in certain circumstances may choose to use their emergency powers under Section 61 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.' It is for the senior officer who visits the encampment to decide what action should be taken. Mick Page, Essex County Council's Deputy Cabinet Member for Planning, added: “I would like to reassure users of the Colchester Park and Ride that it continues to function as usual despite a small group of travellers parking at the site car park."
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KeithW
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by KeithW »

roadtester wrote:
c2R wrote:
Andy33gmail wrote:I wonder if anyone uses Cambridge's ones now they're no longer free?
This was mainly done to penalise NHS staff who walk from Babraham Road park and ride to work at Addenbrooke's (owing to parking at Addenbrooke's itself being prohibitively expensive).
It's still quite a walk from Babraham Road P&R to Addenbrookes! I suspect that there's an emerging problem with the rapidly developing biomedical campus. Road and public transport links are already inadequate and the same goes for parking.

Speaking more generally, I think the Cambridge park and ride system works well. There are sites on all of the main approaches and the facilities are pretty good. Milton, the one I use most, is modern with plenty of spaces and a mini-MSA style building with coffee and sweet machines, toilets, copies of local free papers etc. where you can wait in the warm for the bus.

The parking charges have produced a bit of a drop in custom if the local rags are to be believed but at £1 for up to eighteen hours they're hardly extortionate, and the first hour is free. Milton and Babraham Road also have fairly reliable electric car charging points, and I've often used the free hour of parking at Babraham in particular if I want a quick "peace of mind" top-up for my car if I'm going to somewhere like Stansted, which would otherwise be slightly challenging range-wise.

Although the buses don't run at all hours, the Cambridge P&Rs are open and accessible to cars 24 hours a day, which gives some flexibility if you get caught out bus-wise - at least you can get a lift/taxi/walk there to retrieve your car. It's also pretty handy if you need an EV top-up late at night.
The problem with the £1 parking charge at the Cambridge sites is the ludicrous way it was implemented. Instead of a simple system such as £1 coin on entry they introduced a complicated parking machine based on ANPR. It works this way.

1) As you drive through the barrier a digital photo of your car is taken and the number plate read
2) You park your car and find a ticket machine that is actually working
3) You type in the first 3 digits of your car reg no and select your car from the list of photographs retrieved
4) You then select your ticket type, parking only , P&R or Ride Only
5) You now select how many people are included
6) You pay - note the machines don't give change so most people pay by card

There are not many machines working so the queues rapidly buildup at peak periods and while picking out you car is easy on a nice sunny day, try it on a dark wet winter morning and its lots of fun, especially if the ANPR is playing up.

The operators, Stagecoach East are going nuts, when first mooted they offered to take over the running of the sites from the council and avoid the charge. Instead business has dropped and remains 15% below the level when the charge came in and the council have decided to start charging them £250,000 per annum for the privilege of running the system. As a result they are now making a loss on the routes and reducing service is a real possibility. The council have also seen $1/2 million drop in revenue instead of the increase they expected. A first rate lesson in how to ruin a good system in fact.
crb11
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by crb11 »

There's a complication in that they want to give free parking to those staying under an hour: they double as long-distance coach stops, pickup for the John Lewis warehouse and other uses both formal and informal - my wife had a cervial smear there too - and we've used one as an assembly point for taking youth on a church weekend away.

But I can't see why you couldn't either use pay and display policed by ANPR, or a standard pay-on-exit system.
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roadtester
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by roadtester »

KeithW wrote:The problem with the £1 parking charge at the Cambridge sites is the ludicrous way it was implemented. Instead of a simple system such as £1 coin on entry they introduced a complicated parking machine based on ANPR. It works this way.

1) As you drive through the barrier a digital photo of your car is taken and the number plate read
2) You park your car and find a ticket machine that is actually working
3) You type in the first 3 digits of your car reg no and select your car from the list of photographs retrieved
4) You then select your ticket type, parking only , P&R or Ride Only
5) You now select how many people are included
6) You pay - note the machines don't give change so most people pay by card

There are not many machines working so the queues rapidly buildup at peak periods and while picking out you car is easy on a nice sunny day, try it on a dark wet winter morning and its lots of fun, especially if the ANPR is playing up.
Yes, I'd concede that my favourable impression of the Cambridge P+R's is probably conditioned by the fact that I am rarely entering, exiting or EV charging at peak times, so there's less pressure on the facilities when I experience them.

I agree a simpler pound coin in the slot upon entry would be a lot more efficient but I suppose that would involve abolishing the free first hour.

Although it suits my specific purposes (nip in for an hour on the way somewhere for an electric car top-up), I'm never quite sure what the purpose of that first free hour is anyway. Presumably it is to allow the dropping off of people for the P+R bus without incurring parking charges, but that could be achieved by having a drop-off area outside the barriered-off bit.
WHBM
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by WHBM »

Such systems are prey to the salesmen from rival ticket machine manufacturers who will offer a range of incentives - cheaper purchase price, a higher percentage of the takings for the local authority, etc - when the actual functionality and convenience of the machine doesn't enter into the discussion.
crb11
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by crb11 »

Unlike a typical car park, a P&R has lots of people wanting to leave at the same time, so if you're doing pay-on-exit you need a greater capacity of machines than you might otherwise do. Cambridgeshire seem to have failed to spot this rather obvious flaw in their system.
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by AndyB »

I sometimes wonder if the correct way to do it would be for someone buying a car park ticket - be it pay and display or season ticket - to receive a receipt that could be redeemed that day against a public transport ticket (and vice versa, so that holding a public transport season ticket would entitle you to a free parking season ticket valid until the first one expired.)

Effect is that the public transport user gets to park for free, but everyone else has to pay - but the other complication is that an effective use of Park & Ride is Park & Share.
avtur
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by avtur »

There is a new park and ride carpark adjacent to the M60 along side its junction with the A580 (East Lancs Road), it has been complete for a couple of months now but there is no sign of it being used.
fras
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by fras »

avtur wrote:There is a new park and ride carpark adjacent to the M60 along side its junction with the A580 (East Lancs Road), it has been complete for a couple of months now but there is no sign of it being used.
This P&R is part of the guided bus scheme from Leigh and Atherton to Manchester, which has yet to be opened. The guideway only goes from Leigh to Ellenbrook then the buses run along the East Lancs Road to Manchester on bus lanes. Several new bus lanes are being added. Some are new carriageway, some take over one of three existing traffic lanes. Several lengths have no bus lanes. particularly between the A666 roundabout at Irlam's o' the Height, and A576 roundabout at Pendleton. The usual stinking diesel buses will be used; it would have been nice if they could have been trolleybuses as installed in Rome, (part battery, part overhead). Even better if tram, but the traffic levels don't justify it apparently, although the trams do go to Eccles, and one does wonder how that was justified !
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Nicholas
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by Nicholas »

fras wrote:The usual stinking diesel buses will be used
No they won't. A fleet of brand new diesel-electric hybrids are in the process of being delivered for the route. And I wouldn't want to use trolleybuses given how often buses are diverted in the city centre for events as well as roadworks, so you would need to electrify an lot of the city centre, and that could conflict with the Metrolink's cabling.

Service starts on 3 April.
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fras
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by fras »

Nicholas wrote:
fras wrote:The usual stinking diesel buses will be used
No they won't. A fleet of brand new diesel-electric hybrids are in the process of being delivered for the route. And I wouldn't want to use trolleybuses given how often buses are diverted in the city centre for events as well as roadworks, so you would need to electrify an lot of the city centre, and that could conflict with the Metrolink's cabling.

Service starts on 3 April.
Ahem, still diesels, though, even if they are hybrids ! The electric part is, of course, batteries. Bakerbus bought one or two diesel-electrics and I saw them when I visited their depot on an open day. Bakerbus is, sadly, no more since 2013.

BTW, the Rome trolleybus route only has wires outside the centre of Rome, (from the Porta Pia onwards on the Via Nomentana. I have travelled on these vehicles, and thought it was a marvellous technology but I believe the price of the vehicles were very high, so an intended second route has not been built. Rome once had a very extensive trolleybus network of around 140 kms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Rome
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Ben302
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by Ben302 »

Medway has recently re-sited it's Park and ride facility. The original site at Horsted which was on BAE Systems land, is now being redeveloped into a fire station and it now runs from the main free car park at the Dickens World/Odeon/Dockside development at Chatham Maritime. The P & R originally ran during the festive period or during any Dickens themed events in Rochester but was made full time a few years back owing to students needing to travel between the now closed Mid-Kent College campus in Horsted and the digs in Rochester and Chatham. Once the College was relocated to Chatham the P & R demand died with it.
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Helvellyn
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by Helvellyn »

fras wrote:The usual stinking diesel buses will be used; it would have been nice if they could have been trolleybuses as installed in Rome, (part battery, part overhead). Even better if tram, but the traffic levels don't justify it apparently, although the trams do go to Eccles, and one does wonder how that was justified !
Give me stinking diesel over a mess of wires.
UTCPaul
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by UTCPaul »

Helvellyn wrote: Give me stinking diesel over a mess of wires.
I was in Seville last week.

their electric tram system had no overhead wires. Instead at the terminus (and perhaps the stops in between, I forgot to check) an arm comes up from the roof to an overhead supply and charges the batteries in the tram.

I'm not sure how this would cope with longer routes but for an urban system it works very well. I suppose one solution could be longer turnaround (and hence recharge) times at the terminus offpeak, allowing faster or more frequent peak hour trips.
fras
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by fras »

Helvellyn wrote:
fras wrote:The usual stinking diesel buses will be used; it would have been nice if they could have been trolleybuses as installed in Rome, (part battery, part overhead). Even better if tram, but the traffic levels don't justify it apparently, although the trams do go to Eccles, and one does wonder how that was justified !
Give me stinking diesel over a mess of wires.
Cough, cough
ph8034
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by ph8034 »

Can I nominate one that's not even built yet? :)

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/nor ... l-10865311
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JamesA44
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by JamesA44 »

KeithW wrote:4) You then select your ticket type, parking only , P&R or Ride Only
If you're at a parking ticket machine, why would you ever choose Ride only?
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KeithW
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by KeithW »

JamesA44 wrote:
KeithW wrote:4) You then select your ticket type, parking only , P&R or Ride Only
If you're at a parking ticket machine, why would you ever choose Ride only?
One of my colleagues is frequently dropped of at the Madingley Road park and site by a friend or family member. Other people walk to it from the nearby housing and University sites. This site also has bike lockers so people will park their cars and then use their bikes to get in to town or cycle to the site and catch the bus.

At the Trumpington Road Park and Ride site long distance coaches drop off passenger at the P&R rather than slog into the city centre.

When my car is in for servicing at the main dealers on the Newmarket Road I use the P&R. The dealer has an agreement with the bus company and gives me the ride ticket.
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Jim606
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by Jim606 »

I drove past the Colchester P&R the other day. I thought I saw some additional people parking there? Well you could say; 'Build it & they will come.....' http://www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/loca ... nts-anchor
wallmeerkat
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Re: Under-utilised, badly sited or even failed Park & Rides

Post by wallmeerkat »

Cairnshill Park and Ride on the outskirts of South Belfast has 24 hour access to the electric car chargers. For the most part a good P&R, only minor issue is the insistence on sending single deck vehicles on busy pre-9am runs, as the double deckers are allocated to school runs.

However Sprucefield just off the M1(NI) gets the gates locked at 7pm. If you have to work late you may do without a car. Doesn't open on weekends either.
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