In article ,
Nightjar \cpb\@ insertmysurnamehere wrote:
Many areas have free car parking at hospitals. Always full. At least
when you pay you can usually get a space.

Not at Southampton General, which has a two storey pay car park and can
have queues that may take nearly an hour to get to the entry barrier.

I suspect charging at hospital car parks may be influenced by the
proximity of other facilities. One hospital in my area is remote from
shopping areas and even quite difficult to get to without a car. That
has free parking. Two others are near enough to their respective towns
possibly to be attractive to people not visting the hospital, except
that they charge more than the public car parks in the area. In fact,
when visting either of those, I usually park in a public car park and
walk to the hospital. Of course, that could be a subtle ploy by the
hospital to get people to walk more :-)

Down to the high land costs in certain areas. In most of London say the
cost of the land required to provide adequate parking for everyone free at
a large hospital would be horrendous - and could you imagine the outcry if
the NHS spent their money on this rather than more direct patient care?
And why should patients and their visitors get free parking as a right
while the staff who might work shifts (so not benefit from any PT working
at its best) do not? You could of course operate some form of priority
parking where the spaces are limited - but this would be costly to
administer. Probably more satisfactory to provide transport to and from
hospital for those who can't do it under their own steam for whatever
reasons.
Where a hospital does charge for the limited parking they have, it's
common to have surrounding on street parking at a similar figure. If this
wasn't done, the conditions of local on street parking would be even worse
than they are now for residents of those streets.

Of course you could build all new hospitals on cheaper out of town sites.
But then it would take the majority longer to get there - and of course
emergency ambulance services, which could have serious implications.
The only answer is to provide adequate PT services to the hospital.
Perhaps in the form of a bus service from the local station or centre.

--
*If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate *

Dave Plowman London SW
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