St. Cuthbert’s Church

Parking Solutions Lancashire Case Study

How our parking solutions helped this 50-space car park located in a prime location in the popular tourist town of Blackpool, Lancashire.

Background

The car park adjoins the church building, and its primary use is for the congregation. When the church holds a service or special event, the car park is at maximum capacity. However, outside these times it can often be vacant.

Challenges

Bransby Wilson Parking Solutions approached Minster Baywatch to find an enforcement solution to work in conjunction with a Pay and Stay operation installed to create revenue for the church outside their services. The biggest challenge was finding an enforcement solution that was sympathetic to its users whilst being firm enough to discourage abuse of space outside the car parking terms.

The church did not want a system that would impact its congregation and require them to input vehicle details on a regular basis, and needed to take into account that the church also allows the use of two parking bays to its neighbour, a public house, in a “good faith” agreement for use by its staff.

Parking Solution

It was clear that the enforcement system installed would need to be adaptable to suit the specific needs of all the users. Unlike many of our competitors, the Minster Baywatch ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) enforcement process is made bespoke to each client. To adapt to the needs of the church we did the following:

• Input the times and dates for all regular church services to allow free parking for the congregation.
• Issued the church access to their own desktop whitelist system to exclude vehicles on a permanent or temporary basis.
• All potential parking breaches are to be assessed by our enforcement administration team prior to a Parking Charge Notice being issued. By doing this, our expert staff could quickly recognise potential delivery vehicles that were delivering to the pub and look carefully for mistypes in vehicle registration.
• Implemented a simple process for the church to ‘switch off’ enforcement, when needed, due to special events.
• Installed bespoke signs clearly detailing the terms of use of the car parks, including signs reserving spaces for the pub and church staff.
• Created an agreement with the neighbouring ‘public house’ to clearly define terms of use and procedures to whitelist relevant vehicles.

Outcome

Within weeks of the new system being launched, the church saw an immediate increase in parking revenue, giving much-needed funds to new community projects. More spaces became available to church visitors as unauthorised vehicles realised consequences for misuse.