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Car Parking Consultation

Context

In late 2019, the University held a consultation to understand how the impact of introducing long-planned parking charges for evenings and weekends on campus might be mitigated; the opportunity to feed back through the consultation was open for a four-week period and was widely communicated within the University and our local community. The consultation was qualitative meaning it involved asking for comments and personal responses.

Response

2,159 of you - staff, students, members of our local community, Warwick Arts Centre and Warwick Sport users, and members of the general public - kindly took the time to share your views.

It had been our intention to communicate the main insights from the consultation in early 2020, and to ensure the feedback informed how we implemented changes but, as the impact of Covid-19 was fully realised, the planned introduction of charges for evenings and weekends was temporarily suspended.

As the new term begins, many changes are being made to the campus experience in order to ensure safety of our communities as they return to campus - this includes bringing our attention back to addressing how we move around and park on campus. Long-term, your feedback will help to shape how we implement significant changes on campus to meet our vision set out in the campus masterplan; this includes investing in improved and new forms of transport and micro-mobility to serve our communities more effectively longer term, the details of which will be shared over the coming weeks and months; more immediately, we will reinstate our original plan and introduce parking charges for evenings and weekends, alongside a large number of other parking–related changes. With this in mind, we wish to communicate the key insights from the consultation and explain how they are being addressed.

Findings

Staff permit holders said they were concerned they would have to pay additional parking charges if they worked in the evening or at weekends

✔ Permit holders will not be required to pay for parking during evening and weekends as a parking permit is valid within the appropriate car parks 24/7

Local residents shared their worry that people may park in residential areas nearby to avoid paying charges on campus

✔ We have kept the cost low so it is affordable and still worth the convenience of parking on campus. We will also work with local authorities to update Traffic Regulation Orders in the area if needed and monitor the situation through direct contact with our local residents

Students who have to travel to campus said they were unhappy with the prospect of increased charges without improvements to the bus services

✔ We have been working closely with the Students’ Union and local bus providers to improve the service on routes to and from campus. This work has been ongoing over the last six months in response to your feedback and includes a commitment to determine how fluctuation of demand, in line with new timetables, and social distancing affects capacities on buses in order to increase supply. A new bus service from Tile Hill station to campus has also been launched, subsidised by the University

The new parking changes will be implemented from 1 October; for full details, please visit our webpage.

Thank you again to everyone who completed the consultation.