Letter: Use of Onslow Park & Ride and Electric Vehicles Needs More Encouragement

Published on: 29 Aug, 2017
Updated on: 29 Aug, 2017

From G Basnett

I write on two subjects.

Onslow Park & Ride

Are we deliberately trying to hide this car park? It should be diverting some traffic away from The Chase/Guildford Park – in particular commuters heading for the station.

Approaching Guildford from the south on the A3 you will see just one traffic sign for this Park & Ride. It directs you to follow the Hospital A&E signs. Why? Wouldn’t it just be more logical to put a Park & Ride arrow at each junction/roundabout?

If you miss the sign on the A3 and begin heading into Guildford you’ve had it. The next Park & Ride sign is on the Cathedral Roundabout. It points you onto the University Campus and states very clearly ‘Saturday Only’. I guess most visitors head straight into town, blithely unaware that they’re driving away from a cheap and easy parking option.

(As an experiment I asked four Tesco employees independently if they knew where the Onslow Park & Ride was. Not a single one knew but all knew where the University Sports Centre was.)

Is it any wonder that Onslow Park & Ride is under-utilised when it is so poorly sign-posted?

Encouraging use of non-polluting plug-in vehicles

Woking provides multiple dedicated charging points in three public car parks: Brewery Road/Victoria/Peacocks Yellow Shoppers. (The bays are clearly marked for electric vehicles only). There is no maximum parking limit. You could confidently make Woking the destination of a long drive, arrive with a depleted battery, and be assured of somewhere to fully re-charge. Similarly, you could go for an evening out at either The Ambassador’s Theatre or Cinema, perhaps combine it with a meal, and leave your vehicle on charge the entire time – particularly useful if you’d already been driving it a lot during the day.

In Guildford, we have just three on-street charging bays. These are in residential roads and not reserved solely for electric vehicles. If you are lucky and find the bay unoccupied it is still subject to a 2-hour maximum day-time parking limit.

There is a rapid charger out at Slyfield, but unless you knew otherwise you would assume it was part of the BMW dealership and not for public use, as it is on their forecourt. To use it you may have to ask the dealership to move their cars.

The chargers at Waitrose are of the slower variety, subject to a 90-minute parking limit, and only available during store hours. They also seem to be the only ones that anyone in Guildford is aware of.

Guildford hasn’t got a single charger in any public car park. So we’re not exactly falling over ourselves to make the town an inviting destination for any EV driver travelling from a distance. To the best of my knowledge, only one Hotel in Guildford provides charging facilities and no restaurants at all.

For a town with our air-quality issues and dependence on out-of-town visitors, this seems a rather short-sighted approach.

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