Marple Bridge Car Parking Survey

 

Thank you for the amazing response to our survey. We had a total of 241 replies; 170 on line and 71 paper forms.  We knew people feel strongly about this but that’s a far bigger response than we had expected – thanks!

Many people have taken the trouble to add comments or ideas, some at great length.  All this has been enormously useful although it has taken time to read and analyse all the replies. Also we wanted to circulate all the comments made and this has taken a long time to put into a single document.

Please email us to see the full set of comments – some are very interesting – using marple.lib.dems@gmail.com   If you replied to our survey, you will get this anyway.

There is not unanimous agreement on anything but what we can say is that the large majority feel that:-

• The car parks should be primarily for the use by residents and businesses
• Something needs to change because businesses are being affected adversely; customers have great difficulty parking short stay, and employees have great difficulty parking for the amount of time they need to be at work
• The current resident permit system should stay as it is (although quite a few people didn’t know about this)
• The main concern is to free up the short stay parking on Town Street and most see this mainly being an issue of the Brabyns Brow car park (next to the Midland)

 

That isn’t the whole picture though.

What’s clear to us is that one solution won’t solve this problem. Nor is there a simple solution – else someone would already have done it!  We’ll need a number of actions to improve the situation and to attempt to ensure we don’t move the problem elsewhere.  Our proposal is attached and we feel that this will need a further review to see how it goes.

We’ve already contacted Transport for Greater Manchester about additional car parking for station users.  They are undertaking a review across all station parking, correlating usage and transport/car parking growth. Marple station is in that review.  We are also in discussions with them about some form of crossing by the station.

It might also be of interest to recount what happened in the Brabyns Brow car park on one day when we distributed survey forms.  This is of course apocryphal and only a single day, but it was in term time and mid-week, so we think it was reasonably free of undue influences.  See below.

The next step is to receive any comments on the proposals and to discuss with Council officers the feasibility of the proposals and a potential plan.

Thanks again for all your input.

 

Malcolm, Geoff and Martin

 

A morning’s results!

We were at Brabyns car park above the Midland from 6.50 am to 8.45 am (at which point the whole car park had just been filled). The 5 disabled spaces were not used. There are 68 other spaces on the car park. The 17 short stay spaces were empty apart from 2 spaces until around 8.25. Of the 51 long stay, at 6.50 there were 12 places which had been occupied all night (it had been cold and there was frost on the windows). 2 other cars had already parked by 6.50. That leaves a total of 37 long stay which we watched being filled. Around a third of the users went down the hill towards Town Street. It is a reasonably good guess that the rest were rail users. That’s a total of 25 and not all these were from out of the area, confirmed by talking to many (and knowing some people!) Some were from Derbyshire but we found only two who admitted this. That would suggest the Derbyshire users number maybe 15 at the most and possibly less. We’re not saying that’s a good or bad thing at this stage but this helps to quantify the problem at Brabyns. This doesn’t reflect how many New Mills etc residents are using the Station and Purple Pakora parking.

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