There's been a lot of noise in the local media about the County Council's plans to charge users of the Cambridge City Park & Ride sites for parking (in addition, of course, to the bus fares they need to pay to ferry them into town and back). What I'd missed until this morning was that the same Council meeting had also, in principle, agreed to back the imposition of charges for parking at the Busway P&R St Ives and Longstanton sites from 2015/16.
Almost inevitably, Stagecoach's Andy Campbell has something to say about this (well, there's a potential loss of revenue = profits for his company) - and, equally inevitably, the Cambridge News has used this as the basis of a story. See here for the CN news item.
The County Council documents, meanwhile, are to be found on the rather dull-sounding "Enterprise, Growth and Community Infrastructure Overview and Scrutiny Committee" web pages - follow this link for the specific agenda item relating to this. The proposal first appears in Appendix A, and is budgeted to raise £120K in 2015/16. (There are other Busway-related entries in these Business Plan papers which might well repay closer attention, if only I knew how to interpret them!)
The Council's Press Release didn't go into details, so I'm allowing myself to forgive me for missing this amongst all of the paperwork. And it's worth noting that the final decision hasn't actually been made - that's up to a meeting of the full Council in February.
Interesting financial case here - increase parking charges => more revenue (to County), but for every passenger who decides not to travel at all = less revenue (to Stagecoach). I wonder what the ratio between revenues from parking vs the bus-vehicle levy is?
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