Parking charges ‘can cut car trips’

Parking charges have a role in reducing trips by car, a senior Herefordshire official has said.

Herefordshire Council’s connected communities scrutiny committee last week reviewed a new strategy which will guide how most of the county’s car parks operate over the next 15 years.

Committee chair Ed O’Driscoll said the public consultation on it should make clear the “underlying philosophy” for parking charges.

“Is it purely revenue generation? Is it about demand management? Is it economic support?” he said. “Because somebody will say, actually you shouldn’t charge for parking because it would support local economic growth.”

The council’s head of transport and access services David Land said there were “multiple reasons” including managing demand across limited spaces, “and we want to see some turnover, we don’t want cars just sitting there all day long hogging space”.

“We want to reduce congestion, we want to improve safety, to fund the cost of parking provision, we think parking charges might help in some ways to discourage car trips – not always,” he said.

Committee member Coun Roger Phillips said that on top of other pressures now on local businesses, “people pay the premium of paying for their car park to come in and use their facilities”.

His colleague Coun Bruce Baker added: “Why do we keep putting up prices? That’s what worries most people, and what we hear at parish council meetings.”

Transport planning services manager Ffion Horton said that while the strategy currently points to an annual increase in charges, “we’ve not gone into the granular detail of what is being charged where”, she said.

“A new Cabinet might totally change the parking price, and I didn’t want to make that difficult, this is simply about methodology.”

She added that switching to pay-on-exit car parking, as the strategy proposes, would “encourage people to stay that bit longer, because they’re not rushing in just to pick up one or two things, they could go for a coffee without having to rush back”.

And she stressed: “We are not removing the option to pay by cash.”

Coun O’Driscoll added: “A document like this can be a little bit dry and we want to get the best possible spread of responses from residents.”

Ms Horton said the council would take into consideration views made on social media along with more formal responses to the main consultation – though a date for this has yet to be set.