Campaigners against plans to build a Park & Ride on Bathampton Meadows have warned Bath councillors to learn from other councils across the country who are scrapping or re-thinking their reliance on Park & Rides.
Oxford academic and Batheaston resident, Lisa Brown, who has made a study of Park & Rides across Britain, said: “We urge B&NES to look at Oxford, for example, which pioneered Park & Rides back in the 70s. Oxford has five Park & Rides but is one of the most car-congested cities in Britain.
“And there’s constant disagreement and frustration in the city at how to remedy this tightening band of congestion around Oxford, with access roads clogged with cars, which the Park & Rides have helped to create.”
Ms Brown, who is an archaeologist by training, has also studied the case of Ipswich, whose transport chief warned late last year that the council is considering mothballing its two remaining Park & Rides, which have already cost the council three-quarters of a million pounds in subsidies.
“Ipswich council is subsidising each Park & Ride user to the tune of £3.27 per visit,” she continued.
“And councillors realise that this is not sustainable and they simply cannot afford to carry on in this way.
“We’ve seen Worcester axe one of its Park & Rides sites, where the numbers of users kept falling, nearly close another, and scrap plans for three new sites.
“While in York, there’s concern that the bus operator serving one of the city’s five Park & Rides is running near empty buses.”
Campaigners, who want B&NES to scrap its controversial plans to build a Park & Ride on the meadows in the valley between Bathampton and Batheaston, also cite the example of Wokingham’s Loddon Bridge Park & Ride.
This Park & Ride has suffered repeated flooding in recent years, costing the local councils tens of thousands of pounds in compensation and lost revenues.
Last year the local council finally made the decision to close the site and move the Park & Ride to another smaller site, which opened last October.
“But this relocation is believed to have cost taxpayers another £1.5m,” added Ms Brown. “And the old site meanwhile is left as an abandoned stretch of flooded tarmac. All this comes at a time when a new Park & Ride that was opened earlier last year not far down the road is reportedly not even a quarter full.”
“We need to get people to travel by more sustainable modes of transport,” Ms Brown said.
“Express bus routes for example are shown time and again to work. What’s happening in cities like Oxford proves that Park & Rides don’t solve the problem. They just shift the congestion and cause gridlock.
“That’s why Oxfordshire County council are looking at closing the existing Park & Rides and moving them outside the ring road, and focusing on a rapid transit network of bus routes instead.
“People are finding that sites like a new multi-million pound Park & Ride in Colchester are being used mainly in the middle of the day and are hardly making any impact at all on the busy commuter traffic that they were built to reduce.
“And Sittingbourne in Kent has just announced it is closing its Park & Ride because not enough people are using it.”
B&NES has provisionally approved £4.7m this financial year to build a new Park & Ride in the east of the city.