Park and Ride needs a rethink

Despite my well known aversion to buses (as well as cylists and e-scooters), my wife and I always use Park and Ride services to access major cities, like Norwich, York or Oxford, and we have always found them to be very efficient, even if not always well used.

What all these cities have in common is sheer size, with lots of roads feeding into the centre, allowing P&R services to be on different roads to the bulk of the car traffic. Being set on the outskirts of large cities, these P&R routes also serve other destinations to and from the city centres, which encourages their use.

Canterbury never had the size or road network to do that, consequently an ill thoughtthrough scheme was put in place, using reduced capacity main roads because of introduced bus lanes or routes which always finished up at pinch points like Military Road or Wincheap railway bridge.

It would surely be better to simply divert buses coming into the city on regular routes to call in to the P&R sites, thus reducing the number of slower vehicles on the road or perhaps to introduce smaller P&R minibuses to achieve the same effect?

One of the problems that Canterbury has always struggled with is that there are a large number of car parking spaces in the city centre, most of which are not in public car parks, so there is an ever-present demand to drive into the city. Efforts to change public behaviour have failed on a nationwide scale, we are all reluctant to give up our personal mobility and many are dependent on having a car to hand.

Another of the big issues is schools traffic, not just pupils but also staff; every school day hundreds of school staff crisscross the city to get to work. The P&R is useless for them as few of the schools are anywhere near the bus station; what would be needed would be a dedicated minibus service linking schools to the P&R sites. Would it work? Who can tell but it’s not been tried.

The bottom line is that the city P&R needs a rethink and so does traffic management.

Bob Britnell

Orchard Close, Canterbury