Cheadle and Gatley Lib Dems are moving
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by Lib Dem team on 19 October, 2013
From last Monday, the cost of parking in Cheadle’s car parks for an hour fell from 30p to 20p, in response to requests from residents and traders to make short-stay parking cheaper.
The one-hour limited parking bays – for example on Charlotte Street and Oak Road – remain free.
In the centre of Stockport the cost of parking for one hour has come down from £1.50 to just 80p, and even cheaper if you’re willing to walk for an extra minute or two.
Sunday parking remains free in Cheadle. In the main Stockport car parks, it’s 50p to park on Sundays, but again you can get a better deal if you’re willing to walk just an extra minute or two. The car park next to St Mary’s Church, for example, is free on Sundays.
Overall the Council needs to bring in the same amount of money from car parking – we use it to maintain the car parks, roads and pavements. So to balance the cuts in short-stay parking, there are some lengths of stay where the price has gone up slightly. In Cheadle that tends to be some middle-length stays and long-stay has got cheaper.
The price of parking permits for Cheadle car parks is also coming down by quite a lot.
A lot of people ask the reasonable question of why can’t we have more free parking. The problem is that, if we want to maintain the car park, we have to get money from somewhere. If you go the Trafford Centre, every store is paying thousands of pounds a year towards maintaining the car parks. That’s OK for them, but not for our town and village centres where most of the shops are small independents without much money to spare. There’s one other place we can get money from, and that’s taxpayers. We are against taising taxes – or cutting spending elsewhere – to pay for free car parking.
However, we are looking at ways to make more short-term car parking free including seeing if some village centre residents parking schemes could allow one-hour parking during the day, and trialling one-hour free parking in some car parks next year.
12 Comments
It fell from 30p to 20p but you only get 1 hour instead of 2, still its not bad value !
That’s right – it’s 20p an hour. We do need to maintain the income from car parks, but people complained (not unreasonably) that they didn’t like paying for two hours parking just to nip into the shops for 20 minutes so we’ve made that cheaper.
The village improvements are very welcome but once again it has involved the temporary loss of car park spaces. At the same time spaces in resident parking streets remain empty all day long. It makes me very angry to see frustrated drivers being prevented from spending money in the village.
Hi Les – I agree it’s not ideal. If there’s any suitable Council-owned space where we can get the contractors to set up in the village centre other than the car parks then I’ll be very happy to pursue it. I’m not aware of one, so at the moment if we want the work done, the contractors have to set up in one of the car parks.
Understood, Iain, but please try to progress the flexible on street parking issue. Its a no brainer.
I agree with Les. Why is there permit only parking which remains unoccupied all day. There is this type of parking in residential areas in Manchester ( M15) where none residents can park for up to 2 hours if there space. The residents have priority. Much more sensible.
That’s what we’re working on Jennifer – though in many cases the residents will disagree and be concerned that with one-hour limited parking, they won’t be able to find a space if they pop out and back during the day.
Accepting that some need mechanical transport for health reasons, we are all equipped with a cheaper, healthier and often (on todays congested roads) quicker accessories – LEGS! My regular shopping trips are blighted by the priorities given to wheels and to the polluted, noisy roads or cyclists speeding on pedestrian only paths e.g. the one adjacent to Scholes Fields. Trying to walk across the A34 lengthens most walks in time as well as distance. Reducing parking charges will only encourage more car journeys, more journey costs, slower transport and reducing personal health!
That’s a good point, David, and a balance needs to be struck. We’re putting a lot of effort into improving paths to help pedestrians and cyclists.
It seems strange that a measure to increase the utilisation of car parks happens at exactly the same time as the removal of a significant number of parking spaces!
The chaos in the car parks in Cheadle today is significantly affecting our business.
Iain? I know your working on the flexible parking issue but why is it taking so long? Its very frustrating not being informed about progress. Could you please let us have a briefing on the various stages in the process and how long it is likely to take.
Alistair – we want to get on with improving Cheadle village centre, and the contractors need a compound to work from. We’ve looked across the area to see if there are any better options and unfortunately haven’t been able to find one. If anyone has any great ideas of suitable non-car park council owned land in the village centre, please let us know.
Les – the new residents parking policy comes to the Scrutiny meeting on Thursday, then to Executive a couple of weeks after that. That policy delegates to local councillors the ability to look at changes to individual residents parking zones. There has to be a proper legal process, so it would take 3-4 months to go through I would think, and of course we will need to properly consider the views of residents in that permit parking zone, who may oppose the move.