Park and Ride sites - how beneficial are they?

[Glow worm]

The town I cycle commute into most days (Cambridge) has in the last 10 years or so had a smattering of Park and Ride sites dotted about the various fringes. Can't say I've noticed any drop in traffic levels in the centre ( in fact it was gridlock tonight coming home as usual).

It had me wondering whether all the hundreds of acres of prime farm land being tarmacked over for these things, lit up like Las Vegas all night, is really worth all the bother. Also, doesn't it mean some people in surrounding villages now choose to drive to these places rather than get the bus from home, thus putting other bus services at risk of cuts?

Then I read about this poor chap in this weeks Farmer's Weekly. Seems like a hell of a price to pay. So what do you good folks think - P&R waste of time or great idea?

 

[NorthernDave]

Leeds, capital of the North, has 2 P&R sites, with a third in the pipeline.
The first (King Lane) is in the wrong place, has too few spaces and relies on normal stopping service buses to get you the 4 miles into Leeds. It's used by some but I've never seen it full and struggle to see why you'd divert to use it if you were already in your car.

The second (Elland Rd) is one of the stadium car parks so is not used as P&R whenever there is a game on. If you're not a football fan, you are expected to know when this will be. For weekday matches it closes early, for Saturday games the P&R doesn't operate at all that day.
The P&R buses are a dedicated service 7am - 7pm, but after this you have to get a normal stopping service bus, from a different stop on a different street and request it goes into the P&R. This is an improvement on the original service that dropped you around 100 yds from the car park entrance.
Again, it seems to be in the wrong place, less than a mile from the city centre meaning that if you've driven from home, rather than completing your journey in the car youd have to park, transfer to the bus, pay, then take a ten minute bus ride to the Southern side of the city centre (a 10-15 minute walk from the business district) and repeat on an evening.
The charging system seems to discourage car sharing as while parking is free, the bus is £3 per person - so a car of 4 will pay £12, which is more than it costs to park in the city centre...
There is a lot of debate about the numbers using the scheme, with the council having been accused of massaging the figures to make it seem more popular than it actually is - which won't come as a surprise to anyone who follows local politics. It's also worth noting that when the council owned P&R opened, the same council used their powers to close existing privately operated car parks that were operating on that side of the city.
It has to be said that the scheme does seem to have cost an awful lot of money for what was essentially landscaping an existing car park. Mind you running those sparsely used double decker buses for 12 hours a day can't be cheap...

The third scheme could be the exception to the rule - it's right by a motorway junction, at the end of a recently built and currently underused dual carriageway.
They just need the right pricing structure and sensible drop off points in the city centre.
Time will tell, but with the same incumbents in charge it seems unlikely...

York on the other hand has several excellent P&Rs, where you can also park your car and continue your journey on your bike, using the excellent cycling infrastructure around the city.

 

[Cuchilo]

Twickenham has a park and ride thing going on during the rugby . They are using the car park normally used for rugby traffic about a five minute walk from the ground and have put massive blocks of concrete with signs stuck in them along the cycle path . Then men in high viz tell you off if you cycle down there . Well they try to tell you off

 

[summerdays]

I think they can have benefits if sited well. Especially if the can link up with good bus and cycle routes.

When we are on holiday and visiting a city or town with a Park and Ride we will use it if we can rather than trying to find our way in to twisty unknown streets.

 

[Smurfy]

York is the only one I've seen that seems to work well.

http://www.itravelyork.info/park-and-ride

 

[Spinney]

Having had to go to Oxford a few times on business, and driven over from Harlow, I loved the park and rides they had/have. So much less stressful to just park the car on the outskirts and get the bus in without having to try navigating Oxford's unfamiliar streets while dodging buses and rush hour traffic (I don't have a sat nav, but in any case this was before the days of sat nav). I think in a strange city I'd rather park on the outskirts and get a bus in, and P&R schemes make this easy.

However occasional visitors to a city are not really the type of person the P&R schemes are aimed at...

 

[Dave 123]

When we used to live in Ivybridge in Devon they built a new car park and station on the rail line to Plymouth so that all the commuter cars could be kept off the A38.
This was in the mid-late '90s. It was always as empty as an empty thing.

The reason for the failure(in my opinion) is that Plymouth is to the west of Ivybridge, yet they put the station on the eastern side of the town which meant that people had to drive in the opposite direction to where they wanted to be.

 

[Glow worm]

It would be interesting to see any stats from various places on traffic levels in town/ city centres before and after P&R schemes are introduced. At least some of the P&R schemes seem to be a bit more effective elsewhere around the country. Traffic in Cambridge seems as bad as ever and there must be 4 or 5 P&R places dotted about the outskirts. I think they charge for parking in them too which doesn't make a lot of sense.
So now we've lost a whole lot of fields, covered in largely empty, brightly lit, tarmac and still have a polluted, gridlocked town. I'm not sure I get it really.

 

[NorthernDave]

Leeds council clam that the Elland Road scheme has had an impact. I use those roads daily and can't say that I've noticed any difference to traffic levels at all.
Most of the P&R buses I see have few passengers on board.

 

[vickster]

Is the gridlock due to traffic traversing the centre rather than visiting the centre however? Cambridge centre doesn't seem very car friendly full stop!

 

[Glow worm]

Leeds council clam that the Elland Road scheme has had an impact. I use those roads daily and can't say that I've noticed any difference at all to traffic levels at all.
Most of the P&R buses I see have few passengers on board.

That's my impression from around here too. Seems like a massive waste of time and resources. However many cars a 5 or 6 acre former field can hold even when full, doesn't seem enough to make the slightest dent in traffic levels.

 

[Smurfy]

I used Sheffield P&R for a while. It is an OK system but quite expensive, and so rather galling to see so many old people using it for free, subsidised by me.

 

[snorri]

Strikes me these P+R places are situated at the wrong end of the journey. On a say 30 mile commute the driver drives 28 miles and takes the bus for two. It should be the other way round but as long as private transport is so cheap in this country, compared with bus and train, it will never happen.
I have noticed in Germany and the Netherlands they have small car parks constructed at road junctions in rural areas where drivers can leave their cars and travel into town with another driver thus reducing the number of vehicles entering the town. The "authorities" seem unwilling to encourage such behaviour around here.

 

[Stephen C]

I've never used the Cambridge Park and Ride, it simply does not solve any problem for me. I drive past the Babraham Rd on my way into the centre, often with my partner. Parking is £1 and bus tickets are £2.70 each (£6.40 total for two) and the bus takes 20 minutes to reach not quite the centre. Or I drive straight into the Grand Arcade car park, where 3 hours costs £6 (we only go in on Sunday's) and is right in the centre.

They either need to make the P&R more attractive (cheaper/quicker) or parking in the centre impossible, at which point I'll get my bike out!

 

[robjh]

It would be interesting to see any stats from various places on traffic levels in town/ city centres before and after P&R schemes are introduced. At least some of the P&R schemes seem to be a bit more effective elsewhere around the country. Traffic in Cambridge seems as bad as ever and there must be 4 or 5 P&R places dotted about the outskirts. I think they charge for parking in them too which doesn't make a lot of sense.
So now we've lost a whole lot of fields, covered in largely empty, brightly lit, tarmac and still have a polluted, gridlocked town. I'm not sure I get it really.

I've never used the Cambridge Park and Ride, it simply does not solve any problem for me. I drive past the Babraham Rd on my way into the centre, often with my partner. Parking is £1 and bus tickets are £2.70 each (£6.40 total for two) and the bus takes 20 minutes to reach not quite the centre. Or I drive straight into the Grand Arcade car park, where 3 hours costs £6 (we only go in on Sunday's) and is right in the centre.

They either need to make the P&R more attractive (cheaper/quicker) or parking in the centre impossible, at which point I'll get my bike out!

Yet judging by the occupancy of the Cambridge P&R carparks - and I admit I'm basing this on the Trumpington site which I know best - they are well used, an observation also supported by the long queues for the P&R buses out of town on a Saturday afternoon. Just imagine how much worse the traffic would be if all of those drivers tried to get into the centre in their cars. That said, Mrs rjh uses the Trumpington site to get to Addenbrookes (via the bus) rather than fight for parking at the hospital, so not all parking there is relieving traffic in the very centre of town.