Caught out by change to car park charging
I AM writing to draw attention to the dubious practices employed by NCP at their Adam Street Car Park in Cardiff and particularly their change to the method of payment.
I rarely visit Cardiff city centre by car but on the occasions that I do I liked to park at this particular car park because the time was automatically calculated by the ticket machine using the ANPR camera. This meant that by entering your vehicle registration into the ticket machine at the time of departure the correct fee was calculated for you. Unfortunately for reasons that have not been made clear, NCP decided to remove the automatic calculation facility from the ticket machines last year and it is now necessary for the car park user to calculate the elapsed time as in a traditional pay and display car park. When typing in the vehicle registration into the ticket machine, it simply prompts for one hour of parking without any warning messages and the user must now manually adjust the required fee to correctly pay for a longer stay.
Consequently, on my last visit there in September I received a penalty charge notice for overstaying as I had stopped for just over three hours but only paid for one hour. At first, I assumed that there was a fault with the ticket machine but upon suggesting this to NCP I was bluntly told it was a pay and display car park and I was in the wrong. On revisiting the car park (on foot) to check on the signs, it was clear to me that the signs had not really been changed and most still stated Pay After Parking rather than the simple Pay and Display message that a traditional play and display car park would utilise. I appealed about the lack of clarity in the signage but was simply told by the assessor that NCP had briefly installed specific change of payment method notices in 2019 when they had removed the automatic calculation facility from the ticket machines and this was deemed adequate for all regular users of the car park.
Given that the ticket machines at Adam Street are the same, the signs to users are largely the same and the ANPR system is still in use to check that the correct fees are being paid, the reversion to users having to manually calculate the required fee for time elapsed seems to be a retrograde step that is highly likely to catch out occasional users of the car park. A fair and reasonable car park operator would have installed prominent new signage and added warning messages to the ticket machine’s on-screen prompts to ensure that occasional users of the car park were made aware of this regressive step.