Quote Originally Posted by Eric Cartman View Post
Are patients meant to use it? I had crippling stomach surgery when I was a teenager. The idea that for our outpatient visits my mum would have to drive to the park and ride and then we would need to get on a bus to attend the visits is just absurd.

As for the rant at the end, as Lector said, you are mixing two completely different issues. The people running the hospital car park don't give people tickets for parking in your road. The people parking in your road are most probably doing it for one of 2 reasons:

1. They don't want to pay to park at work
2. They can't find a space to park at work

How do we solve the problem of people parking in your road? More spaces and don't charge for hospital parking. Job done.
You're believing park and ride means no car park spaces on site. It doesn't, it complements things to alleviate the problem. So your situation isn't what's being discussed.

The two issues are linked. It's self-entitlement for no valid reason. The people parking in our road are doing it for the reasons you gave yet are parking illegally on double yellows, parking illegally blocking pavements. That's classic self-entitlement especially when you point that out to them. "I paid my road tax" is the excuse most often given because magically NHS staff are allowed to park illegally or something... again, costly when they get the PCNs for their parking which are ones they can't ignore...

More spaces - where? No room on site at UHW for development of more car parking spaces. So that's out.
Don't charge for hospital parking - when contract ends that's what will happen. Quite how the latter is going to alleviate the space problem god knows because more will try to park there.

The park and ride solution is the best solution available. Definitely needs to be expanded, shift hours worked on, but the onus is to push mainly workers to park off site and bus them in freeing up spaces for patients and visitors.