Increase car park capacity
I agree with the first five paragraphs of John Addison’s letter (‘Don’t penalise beach visitors’, Opinion, July 1) but after that he loses his way.
There is plenty of parking space in West Wittering which is currently under-used. This is because the West Wittering Estate, which owns the beach and its car park, has made the arbitrary decision to reduce to 2,500 the daily number of cars which it is prepared to take onto its fields.
These fields were purchased with the beach in 1951 for the sole purpose of preventing development and providing beach access for the general public. They are spacious enough to take 5,000 cars.
This 5,000 car figure is not a theoretical one, it is the number of vehicles which were actually parked on the busiest Sundays during the period 2000-2010 when I was the managing director of the company.
Every one of those vehicles was able to park within 250 metres of the glorious sandy beach with its lifeguards, café and clean constantly serviced public toilets.
The consequence of the decision to halve the number of cars in the car park is that there is demand which is not being met. The capacity of the A286 (the Chichester Road) is finite and this controls the number of cars which can reach the shore.
But those cars must park somewhere. This has set up a contest between the visitors who want to get to the sea and the West Wittering villagers who have always tolerated and even welcomed the happy crowds on the few really hot Sundays of the year when there have always been queues.
Villagers and visitors now only see a nightmare of unfriendly bollards, cones, notices, traffic enforcement officers and littered verges. Beach-bound visitors are forced to relieve themselves at the roadside because they are prevented from getting near a public lavatory.
Before anything further is done or money wasted the car park company should be made to revisit its decision to reduce the numbers and accept, at the very least, 4,500 cars daily. PETERMORTON Cakeham Road
West Wittering