Is time up for city’s multi-storey car parks?

AGEING BUILDINGS ARE BECOMING TOO COSTLY TO MAINTAIN

THE city council may need to consider demolishing Derby’s multistorey car parks in the next five years.

The ageing multi-storey car parks in Bold Lane, Chapel Street and at the Assembly Rooms cost more than a million pounds in upkeep each year and are far past their expiration date, Derby City Council officials say.

It comes as councillors raise the suggestion that the pandemic might have provided a good opportunity to scale back the number of car parking sites in the city.

Officials also appeared to rule out, or at best offer heavy scepticism about, raising car parking costs in the city to offset a tough year in terms of parking income.

Nigel Brien, the authority’s head of traffic and transportation, said in a housing and regeneration meeting on Monday: “Our multi-storey car parks are getting to an age where there’s going to have to be a decision made – probably over the next five years, definitely over the next 10 years – do we invest many, many millions of pounds in them, which could be knocking them down and rebuilding them, or does the council take a different view on parking capacity and transport?

“For that, the amount of money the council would have to put in and the rate of return doesn’t make that much business sense.

“For areas around Abbey Street, for example, there is definitely scope to look at those as redevelopment, along the line of the ring road, they could be redevelopment.

“Chapel Street is a very tired building. I came to work in Derby in 1997 and I think around 2000 it was conwhere sidered to be life-expired and here we are in 2021 and we are still holding together a posttensioned concrete structure which has got various weaknesses and had various repairs and interventions over the years, but it is fundamentally a very tired building. “The Assembly Rooms car park is another tired building with its own maintenance challenges.” Mr Brien said that a study in 2014 found that Derby had parking spaces in the wrong parts of the city, with some underutilised as a result.

He said the Chapel Street car park costs £2.2 million a year to operate, £400,000 of which was on maintenance. Mr Brien said that maintenance fees each year for the Assembly Rooms car park, Chapel Street and Abbey Street ran to £1.2 million.

The Assembly Rooms car park has 214 spaces, Bold Lane has 315 spaces and Chapel Street has 524 spaces. The main car park in Abbey Street has 131 spaces.

On the potential to hike parking charges to help the city recover after the pandemic, during which the city council has missed out on millions of pounds in parking fees from car parks and residents’ permits, Mr Brien said: “People will go to places where there is something to go to.

“Playing with the pricing of parking has very little influence on people’s visitor and travel behaviour.

“Traditionally somewhere like York, you park in the city walls in York before Covid it would be £10 to £15 for a four-hour stay and they would have 90 per cent occupancy, so it is about the power of place.

“We can see the same impact locally with Intu. Pre-Covid it had some of the most expensive parking charges in the city, and their weekend occupancy would be 85 per cent-plus.

“It’s also about convenience, people want to go to, so the recovery will be driven, absolutely, by what the city centre has got to offer.”

The city council is expecting to see parking income down by 50 per cent by the end of the financial year in April.

It has made around £1 million in parking charges compared to £3.4m last year, alongside £850,000 in fines, down from £1.9 million, and £238,000 in parking season tickets, down from £547,000.

This “cash cow”, as Cllr Jack Stanton called it, is used to fund road repairs, road safety schemes, equipment, parking improvements and large capital schemes.

Chapel Street is a very tired building... it has got various weaknesses and had various repairs Nigel Brien