Over Half of Brits Overpay for Parking

The research, surveying over 1,000 UK car owners, also revealed that not being able to find an available space is one of the biggest parking frustrations (46%). With over one in five (29%) Brits spending more than 10 minutes looking for parking and 28% being forced to travel over 20 minutes from their parking spot to their final destination.

As a result of this struggle, 23% of drivers have parked somewhere they were not allowed to and just over half (52%) often start their journey early in anticipation of these frustrations.

Johan Birgersson, CEO of EasyPark Group, comments: “In an age of smartphones and technology, it shouldn’t be this difficult to find parking or to only pay for the amount of time you actually need. Consumers are using their mobiles for everything, from transferring money to ordering food, and finding parking and settling the bill for it should be no different. Parking providers need to consider how to make parking as user-friendly as possible, to ensure they remain relevant in the long run.”

The research into UK attitudes towards parking, also found that over half (52%) of drivers think that an increase in electric vehicles will make the parking situation in their local town worse due to the need for a charging point.

Birgersson continued: “The rise of electric vehicles and smart cities provides a good impetus to overhaul and improve practices across the parking industry. By leveraging technology to make it easier for people to find parking in busy cities, the industry will not just help reduce congestion and pollution now, but do so in a way that can be adapted to help tackle issues that might arise in the future when our infrastructure and sector might look completely different.”

When it came to paying for parking, the research also found that the number of people overpaying for their parking by 20 minutes or more rises to 61% in the South, but surprisingly falls to just under half (49%) in London.

As Europe’s largest parking app, EasyPark Group already empowers users to remotely manage and pay for their parking, and later this year (2017) it will also enable them to halve the time it takes to search for parking. This is thanks to their Find & Pay app, the first truly predictive parking technology which uses big data, predictive analytics and machine learning to create an accurate parking probability map of every city block for any given hour of the day. Using this information, Find & Pay gives users a route to their destination that passes along streets with the highest probability of parking availability – constantly balancing time in-car against walking distance to destination to find the optimal route.

Research methodology

1,033 Brits aged 18 and older completed an online survey in September 2017. The research was conducted by YouGov. 

About EasyPark Group

Since 2001, our award-winning smart services have been helping drivers to find and pay for parking in close to 600 cities in 11 countries. But what we do doesn’t stop there. On a larger scale, our technology helps businesses, operators, and cities with parking administration, planning and management. What we actually do is make urban life easier – one parking spot at a time. Visit www.easyparkgroup.com to learn more!

For more information or to set up an interview, please contact:

Matthew Tooth, Public Relations Manager, EasyPark Group
matthew.tooth@easyparkgroup.com
+46732678166