At long last the Council has responded to our questions about the failure of its parking space availability policies.
Following our article published in December, which revealed that the Council’s web site was out of date and that many street signs were faulty, we asked the Council when repair work would be completed.
On line site parking space availability click to access
The on line map was a particular concern as it had not shown parking space availability for over 4 years and some of the listed car parks had actually closed.
After some delay, the Council has now said that the on line map – in line with a new mobile app – “will be updated by the end of March”.
This will include an update to the listed tariffs.
The delays in restoring the parking space availability feature (known as the Car Park Guidance System) is put down to issues with the slow roll out of the Council’s new fibre optic network. Apparently the car parking counting devices are currently being refurbished in time for the March relaunch.
The Council also confirms that all of the Variable Message Signs which can be seen on the streets of the city were faulty.
The Council says it has
Parking space availability
“taken the novel step of working with a suppler to develop a new ‘technology package’ that can be inserted into the existing sign cases as this is a much cheaper way of renewing the VMS than simply replacing them.
The first four pre-production signs that have been used to test this approach are now operational and under test in the City, and the Heworth Green and Foss Islands Road CPGS signs are part of this group.
Work is now underway to apply this renewal technique to the five remaining City-centre ‘free text’ VMS and these will be back on street and operational by the end of March.
The remaining twenty CPGS ‘Insert’ signs (right) located in the City centre will be refurbished and brought back into use between April and August 2017″.
There are no plans to provide additional VMS signs in the City.
Finally the Council has confirmed that it is working with a number of GPS/SatNav suppliers to include real time parking space availability features on their devices.
