Finding a Parking Place

Old Jul 16th, 2013, 07:31 AM
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ira
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Finding a Parking Place

Hi All,

For our upcoming visit to the UK, I found that It can be very hard to find parking.

I came across this site, which will help you find a place for a day or more.
https://www.parkatmyhouse.com/

It is good for many UK cities.

I found a space in Oxford in the backyard of a private house, a 15 min walk from the Ashmolean, for 5 GPB.

I paid with PayPal.

I received confirmation, directions and a parking sticker within an hour.

((I)
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Old Jul 16th, 2013, 07:54 AM
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Make sure that you notice if there is a parking post where you pay and get a ticket for your windshield if you park on the street. Your car will be booted and it is VERY expensive to have it removed. Trust me on this one!
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Old Jul 16th, 2013, 09:15 AM
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Have used the site. After using the site once, for next time I contacted the owner direct and negotiated cheaper rate!
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Old Jul 16th, 2013, 10:29 AM
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An English friend has begun using the site with great success when she goes to London to see a play and wants to park convenient to a tube station for her journey home. She sent me the url to show me she was so pleased.
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Old Jul 16th, 2013, 10:31 AM
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carherinehaas is simply misunderstanding how parkatmyhouse.com works.

The vendors rent out space on their property . Street parking restrictions (to all intents and purposes universal near British tourist centres, and often flatly banning non-residents from parking altogether) are quite irrelevant.
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Old Jul 16th, 2013, 10:36 AM
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Ira, another good way to do it is find a Park & Ride which are available in the outskirts of nearly all large towns and cities. I believe there are five in Oxford. Parking is usually free, and all you do is pay the bus fare into town. Return tickets in Oxford, I believe, are £2.70 per adult passenger. Not only do you get free parking, but you avoid the hassle of driving on busy streets into the city centre. I use them in Cambridge, and the Park & Rides always have free spaces, unlike the car parks in the city centre.
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Old Jul 16th, 2013, 10:53 AM
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Here is the National Park & Ride directory: http://www.parkandride.net
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Old Jul 16th, 2013, 12:45 PM
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The Park and Rides can be a very good idea when visiting medieval towns (NARROW crowded streets in the town centre).

We did this when visiting Ludlow and would definitely do it again. The bus was prompt and reasonably frequent and the inbound driver was friendly and gave us useful advice on what to see etc. The parking was free - so it only cost us the bus fares.
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Old Jul 16th, 2013, 09:17 PM
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P&Rs and parkatmyhouse are a wash.

In Oxford, all P&Rs now either charge, or will charge within a few months: typically £2 - £2.20 a day, depending on how you pay. Add to that £2.70 (per adult) for a return bus journey into town and for most visitors (virtually all visitors arrive in groups of two or more) P&Rs are now more expensive than ira's example. From a car in a P&R to getting inside an attraction always takes longer than the 15 mins ira cites.

Oxford's been a wee bit faster in imposing P&R charges than some other historic cities: but with intense pressure on local council budgets, they're all realising that subsidising parking by the relatively affluent is a grotesque miususe of public funds, and charging is likely to be universal by the end of the year.
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Old Jul 16th, 2013, 11:01 PM
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The idea of P & Rs is to keep traffic out of the inner city areas, and free parking is an inducement for people to use them. They are located, for the most part, along major routes into the city, are well signposted and easy to find. If you have to travel during rush hour it can save a great deal of time, and in Cambridge, at least, there are dedicated bus lanes into the city.

I agree that parkatmyhouse is a good idea, and may work better in many cases, but you have to do internet research to locate them, book in advance, and then drive to a private house in an unfamiliar area. That's too much hassle for me, when instead I can drive up to a P & R and be on a bus in a few minutes. I've never tried parkatmyhouse, but wonder how easy it would be for first-time visitors to a city to find them, as obviously they won't be signposted. Incidentally, many of the more central parkatmyhouses in Oxford are charging as much as £10 per day.

Yes, I realise that some P & Rs are now imposing parking fees, but charges are still fairly low compared to short term car parks in the city centre. If councils raise the fees too high they will be shooting themselves in the foot.

Flanner, your "subsidising parking by the relatively affluent" is a bit unfair when you consider that most rural areas have inadequate public transport. People in my village need a car to get to work, no matter how poorly paid the job.
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Old Jul 17th, 2013, 12:43 AM
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Thank you, ira, for calling attention to parkatmyhouse. When I brought up Park & Ride, it wasn't meant to criticise your idea, but to offer another alternative.
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Old Jul 17th, 2013, 01:16 AM
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parkatmyhouse looks pretty good, a couple of my neighbours offer it as a simple way of getting to Leeds Bradford Airport (via a local bus) all part of the opening up of private assets via the internet
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Old Jul 17th, 2013, 01:37 AM
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" People in my village need a car to get to work, no matter how poorly paid the job."

And they need transport to get their children to school, in most cases think they need access to libraries, certainly need to keep what public transport they've got, and - especially if poorly paid - need an enormous network of local-authority funded bits of our social blanket (from the CAB to elderly people's day centres) maintaining. All real needs which compete for declining county council income.

Subsidising foreign tourists' parking arrangements can't possibly be allowed to crowd essential social provision out.
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Old Jul 17th, 2013, 02:19 AM
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When a child boards a school bus it takes him/her directly to the school. Using local transport to get from a village to a workplace in a nearby city is rarely that simple. Chances are you would have to start out hours ahead and transfer between several different buses.

Park & Rides were built for local citizens, not for foreign tourists. If a tourist wants to use a car park, what's wrong with that? He or she is bringing revenue into the local economy, and that must be a good thing.
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Old Jul 17th, 2013, 11:00 AM
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>

A lot of tourists are using GPS/sat-nav devices for directions. Finding a specific address may actually be easier for such folks than finding a park and ride lot as all you need for the parkatmyhouse location is the street address--P&R lots and other parking lots usually don't have a street address that you can plug in--you have to find them by searching categories or something of that sort.
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Old Jul 17th, 2013, 05:18 PM
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I second the use of Park and Ride. I use this in Cambridge all the time as the traffic can be heaving in the city centre and it's quite hard to find a space - Grand Arcade often full and Queen Anne helpfully tells you there are spaces when there aren't and/or entire top floor has been closed off for some unfathomable reason.

Cambridge Park and Ride has free parking and you just pay the bus fare which is £2.60 return from Trumpington. Literally 10 mins to the city centre most of the time. Trumpington is vast and never ever full, not even at Christmas. There are also Park and Rides at Madingley Road, Babraham and somewhere in or around Cherry Hinton. Babraham is often full but the others usually always seem to have spaces.

The only place I ever park in the city centre is the station at a weekend which is handy for Mill Road, but about a miles walk to the city centre proper.

All Park and Rides are well signposted and very easy to find.
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Old Jul 17th, 2013, 10:41 PM
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Exactly! Park & Rides are normally located at main routes into town, and you don't even need a sat-nav to find them. If you want to use a sat-nav and go to a parkatmyhouse, that's fine too — now you have two different choices.

Some people on this thread seem to be missing the point, though — both parkatmyhouse and Park & Ride are great alternatives for city parking. It's not a contest between one and the other, so I don't understand the negativity of some posters. It seems like when a helpful idea is brought up on Fodor's, other posters queue up to knock it down. Why not welcome a new suggestion instead?
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Old Jul 17th, 2013, 11:34 PM
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When I see the signs for Trumpington I can't help thinking "Pugh, Pugh, Barney Mcgrew....".

P&R is a godsend for commuters, and when I'm playing tourist in other cities it's usually what I head for. The sat nav will get us to city centre car parks, but I'd rather park on the outskirts and let a bus driver negotiate the traffic for me. If you use them out off peak times it's easy to beat the oldies to the front seats upstairs for the best views.
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Old Jul 18th, 2013, 08:29 AM
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Three East Angulans on one thread. That makes me happy
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