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12
May
Gasps as businesses told Harrogate ‘the cheapest place to park in North Yorkshire'
Harrogate is the cheapest place to park in North Yorkshire, the man who oversees the service said last night.
Steve Brown, North Yorkshire Council’s head of parking services, was one of three guest speakers at Harrogate District Chamber of Commerce’s monthly meeting at the town’s Old Swan Hotel.
During his presentation, Mr Brown asked chamber members if they knew where the cheapest and most expensive places to park in North Yorkshire are.
He then revealed:
The most expensive place to park in North Yorkshire is Scarborough — on an average price. And the cheapest? Harrogate. You can find a 30p tariff in Ripon. As an average price, Harrogate is the cheapest.
There were gasps and cries of ‘no’ when Mr Brown described Harrogate as the cheapest location. “I thought that would stir some interest,” he remarked.
Parking in York, where prices are more expensive, is overseen by City of York Council, and therefore not included in the comparison.
(from left) Tony Watson, the council's head of tourism and economy, Steve Brown, head of parking services and Harrogate BID chief executive Jason Maxwell at the chamber event.
Parking prices have been a hot topic recently. The council backed down on plans to increase tariffs by more than 300% in some parts of the Harrogate district after a backlash. Instead, it increased them by 10% and said it would upgrade parking machines,
The council also abandoned plans to introduce a single parking app for North Yorkshire because, Mr Brown said, it “couldn’t work out” what the company hired to implement the system was trying to do.
It now plans to adopt the National Parking Platform, a government initiative that supports a range of apps, including AppyParking, which is used in the Harrogate district.
A parking disc
Disc parking changes?
Mr Brown also hinted at changes to disc parking in forthcoming local area action plans for parking, which the council is adopting in Whitby, Scarborough and Filey, with Harrogate and Knaresborough to follow.
Mr Brown said disc zones accounted for about 60,000 of 83,000 penalty charge notices in North Yorkshire in the last year. Six months ago, he added, the council received a delivery of 13 pallets of free parking discs to give away:
Disc zones are a product of North Yorkshire and Cumbria because nobody else has got them. So when all these tourists arrive, they haven’t got a clue. We need to address that because it’s silly.
Harrogate's Victoria Car Park
The action plans will also consider issues such as free parking after 6pm, commuter parking pressures, motorhome management and resident permits.
Harrogate’s plan will also look at multi-storey car parks. Mr Brown said the town had the only three multi-storey car parks in North Yorkshire and there was a need to look at the “very underused” Victoria Car Park, which he attributed to it being “strapped to the shopping centre and when that shuts you can’t get in unless you go through One Arch”.
Devising permits for retailers was something “we may well look at” in the new plans to tackle this, Mr Brown said.
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