Parking

Feelings are running high in the town over car parking charges. Ah, it was ever thus. Well, almost. Parking, of course, was once upon a time free of charge, into the mid-1990s.

Shoppers now have an opportunity to add their name to those who wish to see car-parking charges reduced. Organisers are petitioning the county council to lower the charge for three hours’ worth of parking from £1 to 20p and you can find a copy of the petition in a number of town centre outlets. The calls are based on charges in Yr Wyddgrug/Mold, where you can park all day for a maximum of 50p and usually 20p gets you three hours.

No one wishes to pay more for car parking than they need to, so this petition’s guaranteed to be a success. I may distribute one that asks residents whether they might like their council tax reduced by four-fifths in line with the parking petition. Whether the car parking petition will change minds in what is expected to be a very tough 2010 for local authorities remains to be seen.

What do you think about this? Let’s try to unpack it. We’re taking a view that we hope will provoke a reaction. Any reaction, really.

• Is £1 an unreasonable charge? For three hours, it’s not such bad value, at 33p an hour. While Yr Wyddgrug’s cheaper, theirs is probably not an economic one and is a legacy of the subsidy paid as part of the planning permission for parc siopa Brychdyn/Broughton retail park.


• Does 20p or 50p in Yr Wyddgrug mean full car parks? There’s plenty of surplus space, even on Wednesday market days (though not on Saturdays). It’s true there are more spaces to fill than in Rhuthun but also theoretically, more demand: the population’s about double, added to which Mynydd Isa and Bwcle are nearby.


• Will 50p a day encourage people to travel from Rhuthun to Yr Wyddgrug? People will travel to Yr Wyddgrug if they wish to travel to Yr Wyddgrug, not because parking’s cheaper. There’s no economic argument for suggesting parking will force people away from Rhuthun. Take an average Ford Focus 1.4. The cost of a return journey to Yr Wyddgrug would currently be £2.77 in fuel alone (at Monday’s Rhuthun price of £1.08/litre). The AA suggests the true cost of motoring is around 50p per mile (=£11.00). It seems something of a false economy to drive 22 miles return to save 50p on the cost of parking.


• Will visitors to Rhuthun be put off by parking charges? This is not logical. They probably pay a higher parking charge where they come from (other than Yr Wyddgrug, obviously). People who come to Rhuthun still treat the town as something of a “destination” shopping objective. We trust they are prepared to spend and a modest £1 parking charge should not deter. If they’ve arrived to look around the Old Gaol, this alone will cost £7 for two adults.

Introduced this month in Market Street is a means of paying for car parking over the phone, by credit card. While some will no doubt quip that you need a credit card to park in Rhuthun, the use of a card seems a good way of sugaring the pill. The cost becomes somewhat hidden, in the same way that once you’ve tanked up your car by card, you never recognise that you spend 50p for every mile you do.

Rhuthun/Ruthin Blog parking survey