Britain's car parking is a complete disaster

Somehow we've turned key national infrastructure into the wild west.

Checking the coast was clear, I parked up and removed my trousers¹ fifty yards short of the station car park to avoid triggering the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system, hiding behind the passenger side of my car to look less obvious to passing traffic. I wouldn’t be needing trousers where I was going. If anything, they’d be a hindrance.

I was here to retrieve my partner’s car. This would not normally be a problem or require the removal of clothing, but today was different because the car park was under feet of water. Bedfordshire had received record rainfall in the days before, resulting in apocalyptic scenes across the county as rivers overflowed and major roads flooded. The station car park was another victim. A nearby stream had burst its banks, the drains were inadequate, and some fifty cars were stranded like beached whales in a temporary lake, all written-off, their wet and miserable owners wading between them² to recover their possessions.

Photo by Chris Gallagher on Unsplash

Retrieving the cars themselves would be a much bigger problem. The entrance to the car park was protected by a height-restriction bar, which meant that tow-trucks from local garages couldn’t get on to the site. A simple problem, easily solved - just contact the company that manages the car park and get them to come out and deal with it. People tried. They tried for three or four days. In that time the ANPR system continued to operate, still able to issue fines, so people paid £5 per day to keep their dead cars in a lake.

At some point an enterprising resident may have vandalised the height restriction bar³. A simple problem, easily solved, and the grateful citizens of Bedfordshire shall never reveal their secret.

I say ‘station car park’ but actually there are two, one on the east side of the tracks, one on the west. Each is run by a different company, with a different billing system, different rules, different confusing app and different prices. For years, even experienced residents have been regularly caught out by this, paying online for parking only to realise when a fine lands on the doormat⁴ that they’ve paid for the wrong car park. Some people parked there all week, assuming they’d paid, and came home to a whole collection of fines. All these fines were issued automatically by a company with questionable commitment to answering phones, and therefore difficult to contest.

This is surprisingly common in Britain, a nation befuddled by needlessly overcomplicated parking. The residents of Long Buckby near Daventry had a similar problem, as did those of St. Neots and Banbury and Grantham and… well you get the point and can Google in your own time. A common retort is that people should read the signs more carefully, and yes that’s true; but people are often in a rush and have life going on and this obscures a bigger point which is that it is utterly stupid to have multiple companies operating car parks at the same station, the kind of decision that can only be made by people who have zero concept of good customer experience.

Last year, the remote overlords of our station car park - well, one of them - did something surprisingly generous: they announced free parking on weekends and bank holidays, allowing thousands of grateful families to use the railway network more cheaply. It was difficult to fault the move, except for one teeny, tiny detail that’s hardly worth mentioning…

It turns out they were required to provide free parking on weekends and bank holidays as part of the car park’s planning conditions. They had been required to do this for the last decade, since 2014, but hadn’t bothered. Instead, they had charged residents weekend after weekend, bank holiday after bank holiday, for ten years. That’s somewhere in the region of 1,100 days that a 400-space car park charged people it shoudn’t have, raking in hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of pounds from locals. Only after a long and vigorous campaign by aggrieved local residents did they finally concede this point.

You might ask why the council didn’t spot this, and there’s no satisfactory answer. The council does, for the time being, have a planning enforcement team; but it’s woefully underfunded and responds only reactively to complaints. As far as I can tell there’s no proactive effort by the council to check that contracted services like car parks are being run correctly, which is why they weren’t for ten years.

Even this limited effort may not last long though - planning enforcement is not one of the things that a council is compelled to provide, and with local government budgets being absolutely destroyed by spiralling costs of social care, it’s hard to see how they can afford to keep it going much longer.

Car parks are a key part of something I like to call the ‘National User Experience’⁵: a category of things that have been largely abandoned by government yet have a major impact on people’s daily lives and their perception of how the country is being run. Car parks, potholes, neglected public spaces, boarded-up shopping centres, persistent antisocial behaviour, the punctuality of trains - things people encounter day after day after day that make life a little bit harder, a little bit more miserable.

When Labour tries to get reelected in 2029, yes national issues will play a big part, but I think Westminster politicians massively underestimate the impact of unglamorous daily drudgery on much of the population: fix potholes and parking and you’re showing visible change to a lot of grateful people. Fail, and whatever you do at national level is overshadowed by the continuing enshittification of Britain.

In a sane world, all public transport including car parking would be wrapped up in a single, easy payment system. You should be able to tap in and out of car parks with an Oyster card or equivalent, with the parking charge rolled into your ticket. If you want to get people out of cars and onto public transport, providing a frictionless way to move between the two is a good start, particularly outside London where bus services will never be sufficient and personal transport is a necessity for many people.

The Department for Transport made some moves in this direction with the idea of the ‘National Parking Platform’, as my friend and podcast co-host James O’Malley covered numerous times on his Substack:

In a nutshell it is a clever idea that will hopefully stop parking apps from being a total nightmare, by severing the link between payment apps and specific car parks.

So the idea is that you’ll be able to roll up to any car park that’s on the platform, and you’ll be able to use the parking app of your choice to pay. So if you already use RingGo, you’ll be able to use that. If you’d prefer to use JustPark, you can use that instead. And so on.

It’s a brilliant idea that would make life easier for many people, so inevitably funding for it was canned in February this year, leaving its future uncertain.

Perhaps the idea can be salvaged, but even then it only fixes the payment side of things. A much bigger problem is that key infrastructure around our railway stations has been outsourced to companies that often barely seem to exist beyond a mailing address, with virtually no serious oversight from local or national government, leading to predictable results.

I don’t have a problem with private management companies running car parks - like most proud centrists I don’t really mind who provides services as long as they’re of a high standard, and lord knows plenty of public bodies would do a similarly crap job. The problem is that whoever runs these services - from car parks to care homes - local authorities have no capacity left to provide oversight on behalf of residents to make sure they’re run effectively, in a way that makes sense for users.

When services are run without oversight, they tend to be run badly. As long as this remains the case, it’s hard to see how any of them are going to improve; and with councils under increasing fiscal pressure, car parking looks set to get even more frustrating in the future.

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Hello! Martin here, and I’m sorry to announce that I’ve started a podcast with my good friend James O’Malley (who statistically you probably already follow). It’s all about building an abundant future but a bit more snarky and fun than that po-faced description implies. Last week’s episode touched on car parking and defence spending, while this week we’ve interviewed our first guest, YIMBY MP Chris Curtis, to get his response to the new planning and infrastructure bill as well as some thoughts on Milton Keynes and lab-grown meat.

Find The Abundance Agenda below, or wherever you get your podcasts. And as ever you can follow me on BlueSky.

1. For concerned readers, I had some old pyjama bottoms to conceal my modesty, but I needed to change between wet and dry clothes for this adventure and didn’t want to drive my own car into the edge of the car park and get charged for parking while doing it, so had to perform this manoeuvre up the street.

2. Some unsolicited advice if you’re ever in floodwaters - it’s amazing how strong the currents are even in 2-3 feet of water. Be careful.

3. But really, who knows.

4. Realistically in their email inbox but ‘doormat’ sounds so much more dramatic and invasive.

5. I have a post on the national user experience in the works, probably for late April, so please Subscribe.