Thursday 22 December 2011

Making the most of our Roads - Pre-booked Parking.

Imagine...

You want to go in to Brighton for the New Year Sales, you will be bringing back lots of items, so need your car to transport them.

As things stand today, you set off early, you hit the traffic queues, slowly crawl into Brighton, stop/start, stop/start burning fuel, wearing brakes, emitting fumes. Eventually you get to join the long, long queue for the car park and then trickle even more slowly forwards until eventually you get through the barrier and go looking for a space. Time wasted, fuel wasted, jams caused.

Or

You txt a request for a parking space near the shops you want to visit, request a time and duration of stay. You get a txt back giving three options for available locations, time and duration. You select one, then get on with your business. Knowing that there will be no jams and a space will be waiting for you, you set of shortly before you allocated slot, driver directly to the parking space park and shop.

An answer - pre-booked parking

A huge number of vehicles clogging Brighton roads are simply looking for or waiting for a place to park.

They sit in queues, holding up other traffic all emitting fumes to no purpose.

A solution? How about making all parking spaces in Brighton pre-bookable so no car ever waits for a space? Before a vehicle even starts its journey, the driver knows where they are going - and because the roads are clear there is no need to set off early to allow for jams. Set of to arrive just in time, as the previous vehicle vacates its space.

So drivers spend less time travelling, so use less fuel, emit fewer fumes and tie up the roads less.

How do you force people to use the pre-booking? You don't need to, it as long as bookings are allocated fairly everyone is better off, there is no reason/need to force people to use it.

Council tax payers could be given a free allowance of parking slots, early booking could be given a discount, any person, company or organisation with parking space could allow the system to manage their space too (when they don't need it).

The city has recently abandoned plans for 'Park and Ride' - but with pre-booked parking the city could implement 'Park and Park' for its visitors - instead of queueing on the city roads, wait in a holding area outside the city until a parking spaces is allocated and then drive directly to it to arrive just as it becomes available.

Brightons roads would be used for their intended purpose, to let people get from A to B, not as a huge holding area for people waiting for parking spaces.

Good For Brighton - Its people, visitors and businesses

Under Labour, Conservative and Greens, the council are jaded and out of new ideas they are all pretty much the same in thinking pricing is the only solution.

The city needs to move away from the failed old parties and the new failed party (the Greens) and get some fresh thinking - that's me - that's UKIP.

No comments:

Post a Comment