Residents Parking Zone And Supporter Buses

Part of the Memorial Stadium redevelopment is the introduction of a match-day Residents' Parking Zone (RPZ). Many supporters of the redevelopment plans cited this as a reason why locals should support the plans rather than oppose them. They argued that with the introduction of supporter buses and the RPZ residents would be much better off after the new stadium was built.

Let's look at the facts. The transport assessment report done for Rovers as part of the planning application, showed that the current stadium size would use up all the spare parking within a 1.5km radius from the stadium (just under a mile in old money). The proposed RPZ included only twelve roads initially but was later extended to cover sixteen roads (or parts of roads). The following map shows the 1.5km radius as the main circle and the RPZ roads marked with blue in the center.



Click on the above to see a larger version. The sixteen roads included in the RPZ are all very close to the stadium and only include about one tenth of the parking area already impacted by the stadium parking.



As part of the plans Rovers would pay £100,000 to the council to set up the parking zone which is small change out of the £30 million that will be generated by the enabling development (a mere third of one percent). They have also agreed to pay for the running of the RPZ indefinitely. These measures are to be set out in the Section 106 agreement (or S106 which is the legal arrangement that must be agreed between Rovers and the Council before the planning permission becomes official).

Each household within the sixteen streets will be given one parking permit free of charge. Households with more than one car will have to buy additional permits and visitor permits will also have to be purchased when residents within the zone expect car driving guests. The annual permit cost has been suggested at around £100. This seems inordinately high especially compared to the £16 per year charged for the Norwich residents parking (see the "Like Norwich?" article below).

Then there is the question of supporter buses. These buses will be introduced as attendance numbers increase. When the average match attendance from the previous season (i.e. year) reaches 8,000 one supporter bus will be introduced and four park and ride buses will be introduced (from some as yet undecided park and ride location). An additional supporter bus will be added for each additional 1,000 average attendees above 8,000 from the previous year and one additional park and ride bus will be added for each 1,000 average attendees above 12,000 from the previous year.

This means that if every match from the previous season was sold out there would be a total of 11 supporter buses coming from various location around Bristol and 11 buses serving a park and ride location. A double decker can hold 84 passengers (including standing) so that is a maximum of 1,848 out of 18,000 fans coming by these buses.

However the key thing is that it is the AVERAGE from the PREVIOUS year. This means that there has to be a year of attendances which need the buses before they will be added and the peak attendances will always be much higher than the average attendances. For instance, in a season if attandances ranged from 9,000 to 16,900 there would only be five supporter buses because the average would be just under 13,000.




The table above shows a 30% variation in the number of attendees around each of the trigger level which would be a pretty realistic variation. That is to say if the attendance levels for a season fall evenly within the range of numbers in the first two columns then the number of supporter and park and ride buses will be as shown in the right hand columns.

The point is that to get the number of supporter buses high, the attendances have to be very high. And even when all of the buses are in service, they will only have a minor impact on car usage even if the buses are fully used. In reality the take-up of the supporter buses may be very poor since people will have become used to driving before the buses are even introduced.