[Thomas J Stamp]

We were contacted by the St for this and gave a lot of comment, cant tell if it made it as i'm not a subscriber.

If it didnt, the gist of what we said to them was as follows:

The parking rates are too high. The reasons given for them being either introduced where they had not existed or raised where they did was to raise money to improve parking and also to discourage casual parking by non rail users.

as you can imagine we have always been sceptical of these reasons.

surely on these figures any improvements have been long paid for - and these are not even national figures - and as for discouraging casual parking, there is no evidence we know of to either prove or disprove this theory.

However we have advocated that if these charges are simply a deterrent, then a simple refund system for weekly, monthly and yearly ticket holders (there are several ways of doing this) can be put in place.

(one example regarding the last part is a simple validation system along the lines of which the likes of tesco in the jervis shopping centre use).

(another one is to inbuld a yearly parking pass fee into the taxsaver scheme)

the real reason was simply to raise money lost at the fares box and by way of reduced subvention, but thats always the way.