Survey shows that 62 percent of householders – even those with no car – rate garage/off street parking as 'important'
Experiences of, and attitudes towards, parking – based on results from the December 2008 Opinions (Omnibus) Survey undertaken by the Office for National Statistics – show that 62% of respondents who had moved home in the last five years considered the availability of garage/off street parking to be very or fairly important when choosing somewhere to live.
Download the survey results from the DfT website.
This includes almost three in ten of those living in households without a car. The survey suggested that 48% of all households had access to a garage and 57% to other off-street parking.
Just over a half (55%) of car owning households had access to a garage, whereas 23% used a garage for parking their car over night. Fifty-four per cent (54%) of all respondents said that there were parking restrictions in their local area.
Local parking restrictions
Of those respondents with parking restrictions in their locality, 65% thought the number of restrictions was about right and 61% that the enforcement levels were about right. Around a quarter of respondents said the parking restrictions caused them problems, with almost a fifth saying the restrictions were confusing.
A quarter of car users said that they limited their car use a great deal or to some extent because of the cost (27%) or the availability of parking (28%). A third (35%) said that they limited their car use a great deal or to some extent because of the cost of petrol.
Parking tickets
Overall, 18% of car drivers said that they had received a parking ticket in the last year. Among 16 to 34 year-olds the figure was higher at 32%.
37% of those in receipt of a ticket did not accept that they had parked illegally.
In around seven in ten instances where the local authority issued a ticket the recipient accepted this without appeal. In 10% of cases an appeal was made and accepted and in 16% an appeal made and rejected.
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