Now To Net A Parking Bay

Finding a car park just got easier. New website www.carparks4u.com provides drivers with a list of suitable locations after being given a postcode or street name.

Auto Express Car Reviews

08th March 2005

However, the site - which has only been up and running for a few days - isn't foolproof. We submitted a search for the nearest facility to our London office, and while it listed five locations that are close by, it missed the car park just round the corner!

Visitors to the database can even specify different types of car park. Multi-storey or ground level sites can be searched for, as can facilities with public toilets. You can even look for locations where it's free to park. Civil engineer and parking consultant Ian Betts from Farnborough, Hants, is behind the initiative, but said it was hard to keep it up to date. "I've currently got a database of 11,200 car parks," he said. "Getting them on the site relies on the co-operation of the operators. If they don't help, it doesn't get listed."

Ian estimates there are around 15,000 public car parks across the country. To help him improve the site's coverage, and add locations he may have missed, there's a feedback function on the home page, where visitors can flag up any not included.

Ian started to compile the database eight years ago on behalf of the British Parking Association. It was not used for its original purpose, but on a visit to a town that he had never been to before, Ian realised its potential as a publicly accessible list. He expects the site to get as many as 1,000 visitors every day.