Bitter skirmishes are raging between motorists and councils all over the country. But could automation, big data and disruptive technology provide a solution?
Samantha Moore may seem jolly, perched among the jars of fudge and flying saucers at her sweet shop on Fore Street in Brixham, the picturesque Devon fishing town. But there’s one subject sure to sour her mood: parking. Moore and her family live above the shop and pay Torbay district council £50 a year for an off-peak permit, which allows them to leave their Peugeot hatchback in the nearby town-centre car park between 3pm and 10am.
Along the coast in Totnes, the tourists have noticed, too. The Totnes Times recently devoted its front page to a letter from Mark Lee of Bradford on Avon, who professed himself “shocked and disappointed” by the lack of free on-road parking anywhere in the outwardly charming market town. “Totnes well and truly takes the biscuit as the most visitor-unfriendly town or city we have probably ever visited,” Lee wrote.
South Devon is the site of several such skirmishes in the endless war over parking space, a topic that inspires angry letters to local newspapers up and down the land. Meter charges are as fraught an issue as bin collections or the price of a pint of milk. Simon Lee, a DJ with the local radio station Torbay Sound, recently launched a Change.org petition to protest against the district’s latest parking rate hikes. It has attracted more than 700 signatures.
Britain is home to more than 30m cars, which on average spend 95% of their time parked. In London, minimum parking requirements for new properties were abolished in 2004; according to the Economist, the average parking provision in new residential blocks soon fell from 1.1 spaces per flat to 0.6, putting street parking space at an even greater premium.
What has changed, of course, is the price of a space. Research conducted by the RAC Foundation suggests parking fees and fines produced a collective surplus of £756m last year for 353 local councils in England. That’s a 34% increase since 2011, leading some to suspect that, in straitened times, councils are using drivers as a cash cow.
Terry Falcão, the outgoing mayor of Teignmouth, spent three months of his year-long tenure preparing a paper on parking to submit to Devon county council, which oversees the town’s on-street parking. The council took up his recommendations for a residents’ parking scheme, but he says they also added meters to a stretch of the seafront without consulting him. “Motorists are perceived as an easy target to raise revenue,” says Falcão, who vacated the mayoralty in May, and so can no longer park his Renault Clio in the mayor’s reserved spot.
English councils reportedly spent £4.3bn on transport-related services in 2015-16, of which the £756m surplus from parking charges accounted for just 17%. Brighton and Hove made more in surplus parking fees than any other council outside London but, according to the city’s annual parking report, almost all that money was spent on providing 46,000 free bus passes for older and disabled people.
In Nottingham, the city council places a “workplace parking levy” on businesses that offer parking space to their employees, to both fund and encourage the use of public transport. Introduced in 2012, the levy – the only scheme of its kind in the country – raised almost £35m over four years to pay for trams, buses and the redevelopment of Nottingham rail station.
At least 50 local councils make no money whatsoever from parking – or even make a loss – to keep their town centres busy and support high street retailers. Councils aren’t the only parking providers, though. The RAC Foundation also says private parking firms requested more than 4.7m vehicle-keeper records from the DVLA in 2016-17, a year-on-year increase of 28%. Most of those requests were probably made for the purpose of issuing fines to drivers.
In April, the public service union Unison released a report on the extortionate amounts some hospital staff are being forced to pay for parking at their own places of work. Among the most expensive were the Royal Free Hospital car park in north London, at £85.38 a month per space, and a Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals Trust car park, at £79.50 a month. Hospital car-parking fees were abolished across Scotland and Wales in 2008, and Jeremy Corbyn has said a Labour government would do the same for England.
Hospitals aside, however, free parking is not an unalloyed good, says Shoup, a world authority on the economics of parking. Rather, space is a commodity – in some areas, a very valuable one – and people ought to pay market value to use it. “Some cities have agreed on a formula for the price of parking: it’s the lowest price the city can charge and still have one or two open spaces on every block.
“If the price is too low, there won’t be any spaces and drivers will keep cruising around, polluting the air, congesting traffic, interfering with pedestrians and cyclists. If the price is too high, too many spaces are vacant, stores lose customers and the space is wasted.” Arriving at the appropriate price point is a process of “trial and error”.
Technology, automation and big data may soon make parking and parking management less painful. Already, most UK councils have introduced cashless parking: rather than insert cash into a meter, drivers type their car’s registration number and a parking location code into an app. The UK’s largest cashless parking service, RingGo, purports to process more than 2 million parking sessions every month, and has been used by more than 6 million individual motorists.
The problem with this system is that drivers have to keep downloading new apps depending on where they park. London boroughs use several different apps, including RingGo, ParkMobile and PayByPhone. Teignmouth car parks (run by the Teignbridge district council) use RingGo, but the town’s on-street parking meters (Devon county council) use PhoneAndPay. In Torquay (Torbay district council), it’s ParkMobile.
At least one app is trying to reduce the confusion: AppyParking was launched in 2013 as a parking information service, to let drivers know where to find a space and how much it would cost. Now, it acts as a single payment portal to several apps, such as RingGo and PayByPhone, which between them control some 85% of the country’s cashless parking locations.
The trial was conducted with vans used by the plumbing firm Pimlico Plumbers, which claimed it had saved more than £100,000 in parking fines over the year and reduced the average time to find a space from 20 minutes to 30 seconds. The ultimate goal is for cars to inform their drivers whether they can park in a certain spot, and to then automatically pay for the spot until the driver returns. “We want to make parking forgettable,” says Hubert.
In April 2016, BMW bought ParkMobile, the Dutch cashless parking provider, which is also RingGo’s parent company. This January, PayByPhone was acquired by Volkswagen, which already controls 92% of Germany’s biggest cashless parking provider. It’s a natural move for car manufacturers, which, says Hubert, “don’t see themselves simply as car manufacturers any more; they see themselves as ‘mobility solutions technology companies’”.
Perhaps carmakers are simply insuring themselves against the possibility of a decline in car ownership. In cities, at least, ride-sharing services such as Uber and car clubs such as ZipCar and DriveNow are making it increasingly impractical to pay for the upkeep – let alone the parking costs – of one’s own vehicle.
The logical next step is the self-driving car, which could render parking obsolete. Everyone from Uber to Google and Tesla to BMW is working to build an autonomous vehicle for the masses. As and when they do, that vehicle will be able to drop off and pick up its owner wherever they choose. So why would it ever need to park?