FEATURE FOCUS ON THE NORTH WEST What’s the
story?
HAS MANCHESTER FOUND GLORY WITH ITS NEW PARKING SYSTEM?
In October last year Manchester City Council changed the way it managed parking in the city centre and councillor Nigel Murphy led the initiative. Six months on, Parking News went to find out how things are going
PN Having led the parking initiative, you are the veteran of many a public meeting. Do you still bear the scars?
We needed to find ways to free spaces and so stop people driving round in circles Nigel Murphy
NM I do. The problem with parking is that everyone seems to know everything about it: knows what’s right; knows what’s wrong. There’s the expectation that anyone can drive into the city centre and park exactly where they want to park and it doesn’t always work that way. They certainly don’t want to pay a premium to do so.
PN What changes did you make?
NM We extended charges from 6pm to 8pm Monday to Saturday and all day Sunday. We also extended the maximum stay to two hours and we now allow drivers to return to “top up” their ticket as long as they don’t exceed the maximum time stated.
PN What was the rationale for this?
NM Basically, congestion. The city centre has changed a lot and we’ve seen a big influx of people living around the Northern Quarter and to the south, outside the city. We had the situation where people finishing work around 5 o’clock, perhaps half past, were going home
32 JUNE 2012
PN Where did most negative reaction to the changes come from; from people coming in and wanting to park – or from residents?
NM Hard to say. We even got complaints from people who don’t have a car but wanted the option to have a car with the expectation that they could drive in and park where they wanted to park. Then there was the perception of the likes of theatre-goers who thought spaces would not be available with the new system and my argument was that there were no spaces available anyway. There was a mixture of complaints, and with the Manchester population having increased by nearly 20,000 people within the inner ring road in the last
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looking for spaces and slowing the traffic down as they looked. This led to people in the centre leaving work later and getting all snarled up. I remember leaving here (the imposing Manchester Town Hall in Albert Square) and it took 20 minutes to get to the Bridgewater Hall half a mile away, purely because of the volume of traffic in town. We needed to find ways to free spaces and so stop people driving round and round in circles looking for spaces to park. The by-product of that was an increase in revenue but that was not why we originally looked at it.
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