November 5, 2012 12.12 pm This story is over 136 months old

Councillor: Lincoln park and ride needs planning now

More urgency: A Lincoln county councillor believes the city park and ride idea needs creating sooner to decongest Lincoln, not later.

The development of Lincoln Castle and the opening of the Magna Carta centre, opening in 2015 (the 800th anniversary of its signing), is expected to increase the number of tourists to Lincoln, the overall value of tourism to the city and create more jobs.

All good things if the city can handle the changes. But more tourists are likely to mean more traffic heading through our local area and much greater demands for parking, unless we put in place other plans.

How will we handle the extra number of tourists that will be visiting our city by car? Park and Ride, in different forms, has been talked about for the last twenty years.

More recently, on three occasions in the last year I have pressed the current administration at County Offices to commit to making a start on Park and Ride facilities for tourists and off-peak commuters on the edge of Lincoln close to the bypass.

That’s because I realise that unless something is done now, then traffic and parking problems will inevitably get worse.

But the current Conservative-run County Council are resisting, and saying that Park and Ride should be introduced only after big road schemes, like the Eastern By-Pass, have been completed; that is in 2017.

This misses the point about what Labour councillors are saying; that Park and Ride for tourists and off-peak commuters needs working on now to be up and ready for June 2015.

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Robert Parker is the Labour Lincolnshire County Councillor for the Lincoln West ward.