National Car Parks (NCP), Britain's biggest private car park operator, announced its plan to widen bays; allowing easier access for bigger vehicles. They already widened some bays in London, Manchester, and Bournemouth to cope with the popularity of increasingly large cars. A standard parking space in the United Kingdom is 4.8m in length by 2.4m in width.
They are now moving towards making the bays wider, recognising that vehicles are growing in size --- especially family cars like SUVs. They are planning to widen parking bays wherever possible, The Times reported.
The recent announcement was triggered by new figures, showing that car park collisions were up by more than a third within just two years. There also had been an estimation of a 35% rise in parking accidents since 2014 and more than 675,000 parking collisions are now registered every year. In addition, parking is now costing UK insurers about £1.4bn per year, according to a research undertaken by Accident Exchange.
It has been estimated that there are over 675,000 car parking collisions each year - a staggering 1,859 each day. It also costs an average bill of £2,050 to repair accident-damaged vehicles now.
The Director of Operations, Scott Hamilton-Cooper, said that drivers don't really have much of a choice, but to squeeze in their large cars into the parking bays due to lack of space. Manoeuvring larger vehicles with the challenge of dealing with pillars and tight ramps in multi-storey car parks is also making the place a "no-go" area for Britain's motorists.
Cooper added that there was an extremely fine balance between the demand for wider parking bays and the need for the most number of parking spots as possible. The latest models of Land Rover Discovery, BMW X5, Audi Q7, and the Mercedes GL-Class are all longer than 4.8m, while many smaller models have also increased in size.
The SUV segment has enjoyed huge success in the UK. Revealing a 44% rise in February alone compared to the same month last year, it could be a factor in the alarming rise of parking prangs, despite packing technology to avoid accidents.
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