Free Parking—was it worth it?

Rhuthun/Ruthin’s promotional, seasonal free parking finished on Sunday. It’s back to normal in our town car parks, with charges generally of 10p for half an hour, 50p for an hour, £1 for three hours and £3.50 all day.

Just to recapitulate, Denbighshire waived parking charges between 25 November 2009 and 17 January 2010 inclusive at:

• Park Road car park, all day
• All other car parks, after 3 p.m.
• The Craft Centre (which has always been and continues to be free but for centre users only)
• All car parks on Saturdays 4th and 11th December

The motivation was to encourage shoppers to visit the town centre. Has it worked? We’d say that contrary to popular belief, parking charges have no appreciable impact on town visits.

No one could’ve predicted the disruptive weather from 4th January 2010. This had a marked impact on numbers visiting the town centre (as no doubt elsewhere). Analysis during that period is pointless. It’s also meaningless during the week between Christmas and New Year, as the town in recent years has suffered from a lack of footfall. Whether this is because of some shops not opening or because of the lure of Boxing Day and other early sales elsewhere, we couldn’t say. It’s more likely to be the latter but is probably a mixture of both. Chicken & egg, perhaps.

This, then, leaves the period up to Christmas Day. We’d already concluded that all day free parking on Saturday 4th and 11th had but a marginal impact on town centre visits. The likelihood was that people would have visited in any case. We stated that while it hadn’t hindered, neither had it generated significantly more visits.

All day, every day free parking at Park Road showed some increase in occupancy but this was to the detriment of other parking grounds (just a switch, really). There always appeared to be spaces aplenty at Park Road. What was interesting was the number of people who walked up to the pay machine to find that it had been temporarily decommissioned. This in spite of press editorial and two lots of advertising, plus window bills in many a town centre shop window. For these people at least, free parking made no difference to their visiting the town centre.

Generally, free parking after 3 p.m. in all car parks didn’t seem to act as much of a boost for the town. Take up was poorer that even I expected and little different to what we might normally see. In addition to emptying car parks, there continued to be plenty of free on street spaces available, especially along Wynnstay Road. You’d expect on street spaces to disappear first.

Wednesday 23rd December was the last full trading day before Christmas. It was dry. Here, free parking after 3 p.m. may have had a positive effect.

Compared to the wet Wednesday beforehand, the Rhuthun/Ruthin Blog Car Park Watch Team noted at about 4 p.m. a 37 per cent increase at Market Street, 23 per cent at Crispin Yard, five per cent at Dog Lane and a decrease of 14 per cent at Park Road. Why park free at Park Road when there were free spaces elsewhere? Perhaps Dog Lane remained stable because that particular parking ground tends to have approximately the same number of cars. On 23rd, there were no on-street spaces at either Well Street or Clwyd Street and just six at Wynnstay Road. The week before at the same time it was three, three and 13.

Though these 23rd December figures are encouraging, the trouble is that it’s difficult to determine whether these people would’ve parked whether it was free, or not. It was Christmas, after all.

Free parking was a good and generous offer but did it really do as it was intended? Visitors seemed no more than expected. It rather puts the lid on the argument that parking should be universally free.