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New parking technology will cut the time spent hunting for spaces

ParkatmyHouse has created a database of available parking spaces, to make our lives a whole lot easier – and save us time and money on parking

Busy on-street parking in city centres is having a detrimental effect on high streets, encouraging more people to go to out-of-town shopping centres

Busy on-street parking in city centres is having a detrimental effect on high streets, encouraging more people to go to out-of-town shopping centres

Don’t you just hate it when you’re in a rush to get somewhere and you just can’t find a parking space for love nor money?

You can spend ages circling the streets around where you’re going, looking for people going back to their parked cars, double parking with your hazards on waiting for folk to move and, more often than not, they signal to you (or they don’t) that they aren’t actually going, and you have to set off again… in the mean time, two other cars have already started the search and they get in there before you. Anyway… rant over about the state of on-street parking.

According to research carried out by ParkatmyHouse, the average UK motorist spends up to 2549 hours - which is 106 days - of their life searching for on-street parking. The average time a driver will search is 6 minutes and 45 seconds; however, this is greatly increased in places like London, where drivers will spend up to 20 minutes trying to find a parking space.

The car insurer Your Cover also highlighted that 54% of drivers have had their cars damaged by careless parking in unsuitable places, due to a lack of on-road parking.

The state of on-street parking in the UK, according to ParkatmyHouse CEO Andy Stephany, is having a detrimental effect on high streets and in-town shopping, encouraging more people to go to out-of-town shopping centres where large multi storey car parks are free of charge (but, if you ask me, you can still spend a good 10 minutes searching for a space on a busy weekend.)

With the stress drivers are caused with lack of spaces in city centre areas, the business ParkatmyHouse have set up a database which allows drivers to search for spaces that are available to rent: anywhere from half an hour up to 1-year parking permits.

Spaces can be within business premises or private residential areas (including driveways and garages), where people are not using their car parking facilities and rent these out to the general public for a fee - as much as they see fit. Taking this option can save drivers up to 70% on the cost of a meter and commercial car parking costs.

The ParkatmyHouse application is certainly the new driver planning tool, allowing drivers to plan their journey and become more cost efficient with petrol and parking costs.

If you are worried about the effect that circling car parks and city streets is having on your fuel efficiency, you may also want to check out our most efficient cars – we have lots of great deals on cars which achieve over 60 MPG.

About the Author

Jennifer Wood

Staff writer at Arnold Clark

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