Car Parks 2025 | April 2025

Parking Perspectives attended the Car Parks 2025 event hosted in London on 2nd April 2025. The Landor Links event focused on key areas of the lifespan of parking structures, including design, construction, operation and maintenance.

Parking Perspectives’ Director Andrew Potter spoke about drivers’ willingness to pay for wider parking bays and better ramp dimensions. He illustrated what this could mean for making the numbers stack up for car park regeneration.

After the presentation, attendees were given the chance to take part in The Car Park Choice Game, in which three teams competed to make the most optimal choices regarding where they would park in the city centre when representing users with different needs and desires. Meanwhile car park operators adjusted tariffs to attract users and achieve revenue targets.

The game was played over two ‘days’ with results shown for each team and each car park operator based on a model made by Parking Perspectives. The game was well received with high participation from those attending the event. It is hoped that people went away with a better understanding of the diversity of users’ needs and the wide range of factors, including parking bay size and ramp width, that influence car park selection.

You will next find the team at Parkex, hosted by the British Parking Association, in Coventry on 21st-22nd May 2025.

Playing out Kerbside Management | November 2024

Andrew Potter led the Parking Game at the Traffic + Parking event held by Landor LINKS in Manchester in October 2024. Based around a parade of shops, delegates took part in role-play to explore the competing ambitions and demands for kerbspace and to examine the efficacy of different policy approaches to allocating kerbspace by local authorities

Graham James, Technical Director, will be presenting at the Annual Transport Practitioners’ Meeting in Manchester this month. He will be there to advise how to get the most out of the Active Mode Travel Appraisal Kit and how we might best appraise Carbon & Net Zero

Andrew Potter will be reprising and adding to his presentation on the business case decisions regarding ageing car parks.

The ‘Just the Ticket’ article is now available as a hard copy. This document provides 18 recommendations for changes in government parking policy and acts as the TPS guidelines for parking policy. The policy recommendations aim to help decarbonise transport through parking regulation. These hard copies will be distributed to members of the BPA.

Andrew Potter, Director at Parking Perspectives, is presenting at Intertraffic Amsterdam this April. The presentation will cover the UK’s Transport Planning Society document “Just the Ticket!”.

The UK’s Transport Planning Society document “Just the Ticket!” contains 18 recommendations for parking policy to help decarbonise transport. The recommendations are set out under 3 main themes, covering planning laws, making the use of public space more Equitable and environmental taxes and charges.

While explaining these, the presentation will also draw out a selection of more innovative policy ideas, including: a way to lock in lower parking standards now that enable people to transition from car dependent land use planning; Licensing of third-party car park operators to establish consistency and control on pricing in city centres, and moving away from using the duration of stay to set the parking charge, but instead using the time of entry and exit to identify and charge for a range of wider societal costs caused by the parking event.

The presentation includes animation and reference to a summary illustration of the recommendations made.

Andrew Potter, Director at Parking Perspectives, presented at Car Parks 2024 in London. His session examined the options available to those with an ageing multi-storey car park.

The day had looked at the issues arising with heavier and wider cars in car parks. These were presenting new issues for car park operators. The fire risk, for both traditional diesel and petrol cars, as well as EVs, were also considered.

Andrew set out a financial comparison between (a) retaining and repairing an existing structure, that might present structural limitations with heavier vehicles and be limited to 2.4m wide parking bays and tight ramps (b) rebuilding a modern car park designed to better accommodate larger and heavier contemporary cars, or (c) retaining an existing structure but operating it at lower parking densities.

A key point of his presentation was to introduce some work to establish users’ willingness to pay for wider bays and easier ramps, and demonstrate a payback cost model between these options.

Andrew Potter was a guest speaker for a Reinventing Parking pod cast. The interview, hosted by Paul Barter, examines the UK’s experience with parking maximums and discusses some of the successes and difficulties that have arisen since implementation. In particular the session looked at key lessons learnt and presented ideas to ensure that maximums could be as effective as intended in future applications.

Hear the podcast here:

https://www.reinventingparking.org/2024/03/lessons-from-UK.html

Graham James MA(Cantab) MSc MPhil FCILT has joined us from AtkinsRéalis where he was a technical director in their transport planning team, working on transport strategies, schemes and business cases across the UK and beyond.

He has over 25 years’ transport planning experience in the public sector and consultancy and has worked on parking and transport strategies for cities, major universities and medical centres. He also brings particular expertise in transport economics, appraisal and business cases across all modes of transport.

He is a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT), and an accredited Better Business Cases Practitioner.

We hope that he will add to his already extensive publication and speaking record and provide further dimension to our capability.

Andrew Potter led the last session at this conference at Lambeth Town Hall. He guided both the audience and panel to share experience and advice relating to driver compliance, options of enforcement and control that didn’t rely on cameras and how the implementation of school streets might work in villages and other rural settings where there were no alternative routes and a higher car dependency.

Several of the key ideas in the “Just the Ticket” policy recommendations document were shared with the audience by Andrew Potter at this meeting at the Transport Research Board’s Annual Meeting in Washington DC.

Attendance at the conference provides a wealth of new ideas and approaches being adopted across the world, and forms a mainstay in our annual calendar.