All entries for Saturday 30 December 2006

Allow me a small rant

Unpopular company of the day is without a doubt Excel Parking. Please take a moment to peruse their website at www.excelparking.co.uk

On their welcome page, you will find their rather impressive claim:
Continuing to grow and expand as we pass through our twelfth anniversary year, Excel Parking Services Limited continues to offer the premium car park management and parking enforcement services.

Excel Parking manages many of the car parks in Stockport (see below) town centre. Admittedly not an easy task, as the risk that cars will be set alight and their tyres slit is probably quite high.

Some necessary background info: Public transport in Stockport is crap. The trains run less frequently then they did 5 years ago (and there are fewer than a dozen stations in the borough), so residents of this Mancunian backwater must resort to buses if they wish to leave their cars at home. God help them. The borough is highly residential, incohesive and sprawling, and the buses simply do not run often enough. Oh, and they’re staggeringly expensive. 2 pounds (can’t work the pounds key on my keyboard) for a round trip of about 3 miles – something has to be amiss here, surely. Stockport has been thoroughly abused by urban planners over the centuries, so building an effective roadand thus bus network is a near impossibility. Oh, and even if you do bother to catch a bus, the chances are that you will get spat at, verbally abused to knifed. Maybe I exaggerate a little. Forgive me this one indulgence.

Essentially, the car is the only viable means of transport in this suburban mess. The MB Council fails to provide us with affordable, user-friendly buses, OK, we understand the difficulties due to the geography and demography of the region. But at the same time, they make parking massively expensive.

Parking has been outsourced to Excel. Now we live in an age where men fly to the moon, surgery is performed by lasers, and cakes can be baked in the microwave. But we do not seem to be able to invent car park ticket machines which give change. So not only does Excel charge a minimum of 40p (a modest fee, admittedly, but the fee is levied even on Sundays and bank holidays) to park in its decaying carparks, but you are likely to have to pay even more for the privilege because you haven’t got the right coins on you.

But does the machine give you a proportionate amount of extra parking time if you pay 50p? Oh no. Of course not. They just fleece you out of as much money as they possibly can. The University of Warwick is equally guilty of this, may I add.

This does NOT sound like ‘premium car park management’ to me.

So Stockport MBC – and Coventy City Council – and every other local government in the UK – give us decent car parks, fair ticketing and – best of all – some public transport would be nice.

Sigh.

Oliver Hopwood : 30 Dec 2006 19:38 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem