How the UK’s top cities compare for parking

Head to some cities in the UK and you’ll quickly find a parking spot or pay next to nothing for the visit — if anything at all. For other cities though, you could end up driving around for ages trying to locate one space or put quite a few pound coins into the ticket machine for the privilege. Audi dealership Vindis has looked at how parking can prove much more of a nightmare in one city compared to another by compiling the following insightful research about the topic…

Time spent searching for a parking space

Using data gathered from a study carried out by end-to-end parking solution specialists INRIX and reported on by The Sun, the following table reveals how long people spend on average each year searching for a parking space in some of the UK’s largest cities. It also details the cost that this search has on each driver when factoring in time, fuel and emissions, as well as the overall cost if the entire city’s population could drive.

City	Population	Search time per year	Cost per driver	Cost if entire population could drive
London	7,074,265	67	£1,104	£7,809,988,560
Birmingham	1,020,589	46	£757	£772,585,873
Leeds	726,939	47	£772	£561,196,908
Glasgow	616,430	40	£660	£406,843,800
Bristol	399,633	46	£768	£306,918,144
Manchester	430,818	41	£688	£296,402,784
Edinburgh	448,850	38	£625	£280,531,250
Belfast	297,300	56	£928	£275,894,400
Cardiff	315,040	44	£737	£232,184,480
Southampton	214,859	35	£588	£126,337,092

Cost of parking in city centres across the UK

In the next table, we have taken a look at how much it costs to park in various cities throughout the UK, based on information collated by vehicle history check service HPI Check. The organisation based its findings on the cost of parking in a city centre for an hour on a typical working day, between 9am and 5pm, and is an average price of parking from all car parks found in each city. From these statistics, we have calculated how much could be made from parking per hour if the entire city’s population was able to drive.

City	Population	Hourly cost of parking	Cost if entire population could drive
London	7,074,265	£9.10	£64,375,811.50
Leeds	726,939	£3.06	£2,224,433.34
Glasgow	616,430	£2.65	£1,633,539.50
Manchester	430,818	£3.18	£1,370,001.24
Liverpool	467,995	£2.59	£1,212,107.05
Sheffield	530,375	£2.14	£1,135,002.50
Cardiff	315,040	£3.14	£989,225.60
Newcastle-upon-Tyne	282,338	£1.72	£485.621.36
Sunderland	294,261	£0.79	£232,466.19

Number of NCP car parking spaces in the UK’s most populated cities

For the following table, we have analysed how many car parks there are from the National Car Parks (NCP) in each of the ten most populated cities across the UK, as ranked by City Mayors Statistics. We have also recorded the number of standard spaces and disabled spaces that there are across each of the city’s NCP car parks, before working out the space to person ratio (all numbers rounded down) if the entire city’s population could drive.

City	Population	Number of NCP car parks	Standard spaces	Number of people to space ratio	Disabled spaces	Number of people to disabled space ratio
London	7,074,265	30	6,631	1,066	53	133,476
Birmingham	1,020,589	9	4,253	239	62	16,461
Leeds	726,939	3	1,468	495	60	12,115
Glasgow	616,430	6	2,207	279	17	36,260
Sheffield	530,375	9	3,056	173	47	11,284
Bradford	483,422	2	958	504	34	14,218
Liverpool	467,995	7	1,615	289	9	51,999
Edinburgh	448,850	3	1,847	243	20	22,442
Manchester	430,818	32	11,893	36	366	1,177
Bristol	399,633	6	2,081	192	15	26,642