Dickens Street Car Park to close with immediate effect as council recommends improvements to its car parks

Peterborough City Council is to make improvements to all of its’ car parks following a new post-pandemic report – despite closing one.

The ‘Peterborough Parking Strategy’ report has said the council will implement 70 new parking spaces for Blue Badge holders in the city – 20 more in Wellington Street alone – taking the total in the city to 155.

Dickens Street Car Park will also close with ‘immediate effect’ as the nearby Wellington Street Car Park is deemed more accessible.

It comes as the car park has too many unused spaces while the maintenance costs exceed ticket revenue.

Speaking to Cabinet members at their meeting, Transport and Environment Manager, Lewis Banks, said: “In 2022 the council instructed a revision of its car parking strategy to determine a number of short term ‘next steps’ to recommend to Cabinet, as well as a number of longer term recommendations that need further investigation.”

The next steps will be to review car parking occupancy levels as the city recovers from the pandemic.

Parking charges will also be implemented to include the recovery cost of installing electric vehicle charging bays, including those used for the taxi and private hire trade.

Mr Banks added: “In addition to this, we recommend a review of parking fees and charges across the council and to undertake a review of alternative charging technology such as the use of ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition).”

The report, which was originally commissioned in late 2020, also looked at capacity and location of all the city car parks, as well as pricing, provision for electric vehicle charging and car park accessibility.

Peterborough currently has 6,415 public car parking spaces, which service a population of 203,000 and, of these, 2,632 are under the control of the city council.

At peak weekday demand, 1,556 of the council spaces are occupied – or 59 per cent - and this is despite the removal car parks, namely Wirrina (370 spaces) and Northminster (471 spaces).

The report concludes that ideal peak occupancy rate for car parks in the city should be 90 per cent and the proposed improvements in accessibility, location and pricing all aim towards achieving that figure.

‘ANPR cameras to manage Fair Meadow’

Councillor John Howard was particularly interested in the potential for ANPR and asked: “We have a huge issue with ‘car cruising’ in the city at the moment as has been well reported in the last few weeks.

“Do you think installing ANPR in places like Fair Meadow car park would help?”

Rob Hill, assistant director for Community Safety replied: “When you look at ANPR based on just costs, it isn’t viable for Peterborough.

“However, I think that we need to look at the wider attributes of ANPR – the fact it helps us manage the use of the car parks properly.

“In terms of Fair Meadow, if we can get a level of control over that in terms of who comes and uses it, then that would be very helpful, and I would support that.”

Cabinet members unanimously approved the recommendations from the Peterborough Parking Strategy report.

By the Local Democracy Reporting Service.