While the council insists there is no shortage of parking spaces in the town, many shoppers visiting Kingston on a Saturday afternoon will complain that parking their car can be a bit of a mission.

But that doesn't mean there is nothing being done. On the contrary, Kingston's Business Improvement District has set out and achieved a number of challenging targets to improve both parking and access to the town centre.

It has worked to heighten the awareness of the impact that the perceived/real congestion and lack of car parking facilities have on the prosperity of the town and it has highlighted the problems caused by the lack of signage and maintenance work.

Park & ride is one area that Kingston has been looking at since 1972. Kingston First (the BID) met its 2005 target so that a permanent park & ride project is now in the Local Implementation Plan. The targets for 2007 include continuing to push for a permanent park & ride site.

The town currently only operates a Christmas park & ride service between October and January, running from Chessington World of Adventures south of the town centre. Over the past two years this has seen a 16 per cent growth in passenger numbers.

Town centre manager Graham McNally says: "We want to see a permanent park & ride facility set up. There is one site we have looked at in Tolworth that is owned by the council but they don't want one there and there are a couple of others at the Kempton Park race course. There is a train link there so that would be good, but to do that we have to negotiate with Transport for London, with the owner of Kempton Park and with a different local authority.

"At the moment, our local authority has told us they are talking with local partners on a project but they are unable to tell us what."

But McNally is sure the existence of a park & ride facility would alleviate some of the problems in town. "Even if the core of the park & ride was used by staff. Every member of staff we can keep from parking in Kingston is three or four customers on a busy day."

For car drivers, the current variable messaging system in the town will remain in place for now until two new town centre car parks come on stream. The biggest will form part of Hammerson's Eden Quarter regeneration scheme, but ahead of this the Bentall Centre's car park B, which is being rebuilt, will be ready for opening by the end of 2008. The new car park will offer wider spaces, fewer columns and higher head height, and with 600 to 700 spaces, will provide capacity for 750,000 people per annum.

A new variable messaging system will be explored again when all the new car parks are open for business.

Visiting the town mid-week I was advised to park in the town's newest car park, known as Seven Kings car park, belonging to the Bentall Centre. Directions were clear and I was able to park quickly and easily and was only a couple of minutes walk from the shops.

The multi-storey car park located on Skerne Road was opened in 2003 in anticipation of the eventual need to close Bentall's Car Park B due to structural problems. The car park was eventually closed in February 2005, but despite Seven Kings providing more spaces than the old Car Park B did, the Bentall Centre has found it a hard slog educating shoppers to park there, and only now is the car park beginning to grow in popularity.

The Seven Kings car park, which was built and paid for in a joint venture between the Bentall Centre and the local authority, offers wider-than-standard parking bays and no awkward columns, making it very user-friendly for parents and children.

It was also built specifically with a 6ft 10in height capacity to accommodate 4x4s, while disabled drivers can use the 35 spaces allocated to them on the ground floor. This is the model on which the new Car Park B structure is to be based.

The popularity of Car Park A, however, is not surprising after the centre became the first in the UK to introduce the 'Highlight' parking system - a system that works by indicating when a parking space is free.

A green light illuminates above each free bay and a series of electronic information signs are updated throughout the car park every three seconds, floor by floor, using a simple traffic light system detailing the number of free spaces available on each level.

Centre director at the Bentall Centre Robert Ritchie says: "Highlight is quite amazing. It comes into its own when the car park is near capacity. Drivers know the number of spaces that are on each level, but in the past, if there was a car coming out of a space, people would naturally wait for them to come out and that created a queue.

"The car park would fill OK the first time around but then the spaces created from people leaving the upper levels were never used again."

Since the inception of Highlight the car park has gone from 20 times turnover per space per week to 24, but that is not only down to the new system as the centre has been minus Car Park B since Highlight was set up.

"We did have a period in 1997 where we closed Car Park B for eight weeks so comparing it to that we reckon it's something like an eight to 10 per cent increase in terms of moving traffic much more efficiently," says Ritchie.

"Because it was a first in the country we have let things settle down but we are also looking at different uses for Highlight. If you have a space with a car in it the ultrasonic detector will detect there is a car there. You can stand underneath it and it will detect you as a car and this is also set up in the exit lane. If a car has broken down there we won't necessarily know there is a problem here until we have cars backing up. Now we have two sensors and if both don't change their status and nothing changes for a couple of seconds it is clear there is a traffic jam. In which case, we don't need a person down there watching all the time.

"We have also been looking at the potential of saying 'Right, there has been a car in that space for the past two days, we are concerned it's stolen, if there are any changes give us an alarm'. There is the potential there for having your car secured."

All eight of the multi-storey car parks in Kingston have now also achieved Park Mark Safer Parking Award status following works by the various car park operators in the town - another target met in the BID business plan. Some of the car parks, such as Bentall Centre's Car Park A, needed no work doing to them, while others, such as the car park at Eden Walk shopping centre, which is one of the oldest in the town, had extensive works carried out.

At Eden Walk, the centre repainted the car park and colour-banded the levels so people can remember what floor they are on; the owners installed new lighting and also put in electric doors on levels two and four to make it DDA compliant and increased the number of disabled parking spaces at the same time.

Eden Walk centre manager Ailsa Fraser says: "It is hopefully making a more pleasant environment to be shopping in. It's much brighter and cleaner."

McNally adds: "We created an environment where all the car park owners wanted to raise the standard. People's perception of the car parks was that they were unsafe. You could tell them there had never been an assault in a car park but if it wasn't clean and didn't look nice they were unsure."

Looking ahead over 2007, Kingston First is going to continue its focus on night-time transport, continue to strive for a permanent park & ride site, continue working on ensuring all the existing car parks are used to capacity and, most importantly, on getting the new Bentall car park open as soon as possible.

Printer friendly version

Email this article to a friend