by The joy of arriving at a newly discovered town, beauty spot or tourist attraction and discovering that free parking is so deep and rare.
It’s also a bit sad. When you should be preparing for some sightseeing or a bracing walk, you are congratulating yourself for saving a tenner – and 10 minutes fiddling with your phone and downloading a new app or jumping through the tedious hoops of a phone call.
So watch out for visitors to Durdle Door, the limestone archway on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast – managed by the Weld family-owned Lulworth Estate – where motorists are paying £20 for all-day parking, an increase of 66 per of the day cent.
Visitors have expressed their anger on social media. One said, after a trip with his 90-year-old disabled mother-in-law: “Twenty-five minutes later and £10.60 worse off we left. And you have to pay extra for the privilege of using the parking app! I should have done my homework first and no, I’m not going again.”
A local complained: “[The] Weld Family… is guaranteed to enter. I’m not sure I’ll be visiting there again from my lovely hometown of Weymouth.”
“People will still go and pay it,” said another. “If it was a boycott and nobody went they might think about lowering prices but that’s not going to happen.”
The new charges have put Durdle Door alongside some of the most expensive seafront parking areas.
Suffering by the sea
A recent study by Motorscan ranked the seaside towns with the most expensive parking charges – based on the average cost of a parking space within a 30-minute walk of the town center over eight hours. Using data collected through parking app Parkopedia, Brighton topped the list, where drivers pay an average of £24.21 per day.
The East Sussex resort – once famous as a hotbed of crime and corruption – is almost in a class of its own. The next most expensive was Newquay in Cornwall, with parking charges averaging £12.32. Falmouth came third with visitors paying £12.12. Visitors to Southend-on-Sea in Essex paid an average of £11.50 while the average charge in Bournemouth was £10.42.
Losing track
Leaving the car at a train station could be even more expensive – perhaps to reduce your carbon footprint.
According to research by a car leasing firm, London leads the pack. It was £31 per day on St Pancras station and £38 per day on London Bridge. London Paddington, London Waterloo and London Victoria charge £26 per day.
But one of the 60 slots in the NCP-managed car park at Kensington Olympia train station costs £62 an hour. A full day would cost more than £500.
It’s generally less demanding outside the capital but some station car parks are still very expensive when you factor in local income. Glasgow Central is charged £25 per day, Birmingham New Street £24 per day and Sheffield main station £23 per day. A delayed or canceled train can add hefty fines to these charges.
Members only
Some National Trust sites include parking in the entry fee. Others charge separate entry and parking fees (unless you are a member of the National Trust); at Avebury, for example, it’s £7 per vehicle in addition to the £6 entry fee (the alternative to driving is a train and two buses from Pewsey station). Sizergh charges £13 per person for access to the house and garden and £9 for parking for the day; as the website notes, the nearest train station is Oxenholme, which is 11 minutes (4.4 miles) by taxi, or “a 23-minute (4.2 miles) cycle ride along mainly traffic-free country lanes.”
The National Trust justifies parking charges as follows: “Parking is one way of raising the money we need from non-members. Fees, including any fee increases, are determined and set locally by individual sites. A range of factors are taken into account when setting prices, including the fees charged by other car parks in the area, seasonal variations in visitor numbers, the views of local communities and the cost of facilities and maintenance.”
Fighting back
Expensive parking discourages local shoppers and has a major impact on independent retailers – many of whom are struggling to recover from losses incurred during the pandemic. Around 150 people marched down the Cobbles in Sandbach, Cheshire recently, when the local council threatened parking charges, with businesses putting up “closed” signs in their windows as part of the action.
Business owners in Watton, Norfolk have launched a petition against controversial plans to introduce charges in their local car parks. Breckland Council, which owns 30 car parks in five market towns in Norfolk, says operating and maintenance costs total £450,000 a year.
In Weymouth – where parking for two hours can cost £4.50 – more than 5,700 people signed a petition against high parking charges which they say are destroying the coastal economy. Businessman Nigel Sims-Duff told the council’s cabinet meeting: “Car park charges are like a tax on parking and like any tax, if it’s too high, revenue will decrease as people try to pay it .”
Drivers hate parking apps. The issue of digital exclusion was raised at ministerial level. Everyone hates airport departure fees – which have increased at many major airports this year.
But while the AA and RAC occasionally speak out about excessive parking charges, there is no dedicated ombudsman or similar body representing car park users. In return for £24 a day or £10 a day or £500 a day, drivers often get a patch of bog with a few puddles, wash marks and a remotely located charging machine that won’t accept cash dry. – and a punitive fine if they happen to be late leaving the theater or cinema.
Of course, if public transport were affordable, integrated and reliable – and as heavily subsidized nationally as it is in the capital – car use would be a luxurious leisure experience and drivers would accept exorbitant parking fees.
But it is not. For many families, private transport is the only way to get to a beach or attraction. Should we really be paying so much extra for a walk, a museum, a family trip, or a sight?
