Councillor calls for Oban parking summit
A councillor is calling for a special summit to tackle the Oban area’s parking woes.
Argyll and Bute councillor Roddy McCuish says all eight of Oban, Lorn and the Islands representatives on the council need to meet this autumn to thrash out issues that have come to a head during the peak tourist season.
Since the council did away with free parking earlier this year, workers and visitors in Oban are resorting to on-street parking causing frustration among residents, with other road users complaining about congestion.
Glencruitten resident Ada Daley thanked The Oban Times for highlighting the town’s parking problems last week.
She said: ‘The good outcome is that after a few of us went to the police station on Wednesday morning and also to the council offices, these cars were reported as abandoned and the next morning there were yellow parking notices on the cars. I don’t know what a yellow parking notice does, but let’s hope perhaps it’s a big fine!’
Bosses at Lorn and Islands Hospital are now planning on putting up new restriction signs to stop people misusing its free spaces. A spokesperson for NHS Highland said: ‘We are aware that people who work elsewhere have been parking at the hospital. This issue has also been raised at our Health Care Forum meetings. We would therefore like to take this opportunity to remind people that the hospital parking is for the use of people attending the hospital only.
‘Our porters regularly review the use of the car park and report any car parking issues to management. We are also planning in the future to install additional public information signs to publicise the parking restrictions within the hospital grounds.’
Argyll College said it, too, was closely monitoring the use of its car park in Glenshellach and that its free spaces were for students and staff only. A spokesperson for CalMac, which previously had its own staff car park, said its workers now had the same issues as other people in the town. They added that as most of its passengers ‘either arrive with their car to sail with it, or arrive via public transport’ parking in Oban was not an issue for the company.
However, Councillor McCuish believes a multistorey car park could help Oban, and suggested floors could be leased out to big hotels and CalMac for customers and workers.
He also said the bus park at Longsdale could potentially be turned into a campervan park.
He said: ‘We have to find a way of encouraging campervans to come, not to drive them away. I think all eight of Oban, Lorn and the Islands councillors should sit down and have a summit about parking this autumn. The revenue we are taking is more than anywhere else in Argyll and Bute.’
From January to March this year, car parking income in Oban, Lorn and the Isles (OLI) came to £549,206 – topping its target of £452,971. The OLI total also made up 64 per cent of Argyll and Bute’s parking takings for that same period.