Car parking charges

Where land is available, off-road free parking is to be advised. That is free of charge not free for all! It quickly clears the roads and allows the organiser to direct the public to a series of gates thereby spreading the burden.

If the car parks are free of charge, there is no delay at the gates and traffic can flow in freely, follow the chain of car park marshals and be parked in one smooth continuous operation.

Charging car parking fees can create problems and additional staff will be required at the gates to collect the fee.

Consideration will have had to be made to ensure that the car parking fee selected is sensible. As described in Chapter 27 ‘Money’, a careful and sensible selection of fee rates will ease the flow of people and cars into the site and reduce the effort and burden of calculating rates and handling of change.

Fee collection

Cash float will be required at each gate, with the appropriate denominations to allow the fee collectors to offer the correct change. Fee collectors will have to be alert to prevent a bottleneck forming at the gate and so blocking the public roads.

There is a temptation for gatekeepers to leave their point and walk towards the next car in the queue, but if they do that, before long they will be half a mile down the road. It is important that gatekeepers are instructed to stay on their allocated point and to beckon cars forward to make the cars come to them! If possible, paint a mark using the groundsperson’s wheel, or lay down a board to remind them where they should stand.

For large events and shows where fees are being taken for car parking, I suggest that consideration is given to distributing incoming traffic inside the gates through several lanes that are marked out with posts and tapes/ropes or cones, if at all possible.

This approach requires staff to plan and set up the fee lanes, assign fee collectors for each lane and several traffic marshals to simply direct the traffic to appropriate lanes to spread the load of incoming traffic.

Once they have paid, cars from individual lanes can either be filtered back into one lane towards the parking area or, preferably, directed towards different parking areas and marshals in the same parking field.

Using different parking areas in the field speeds parking and clears the entrance faster, but requires additional car park marshals and only really works in a very large car park. Multiple entry and fee-taking lanes certainly speed access during peak arrivals.