Councillor Says Survey Shows Nighttime Parking Needed

Contradicts previous report claiming ample capacity in town centre

Cllr Biddolph photographed the car park being full on three consecutive nights

February 24, 2024

A Chiswick councillor has conducted a survey of night time use of the car park in the centre of Chiswick in an attempt to counter claims that there is ample spare capacity.

Joanna Biddolph, who represents Chiswick Gunnersbury ward, was responding to an earlier survey of use of the car park which suggested there were nearly always car parking spaces available for shoppers.

This survey was conducted by Benchmark Data Collection, an independent company that has been undertaking traffic surveys for over thirty years and was commissioned by Birchgrove, the developer of the police station, the Flower Market and Hounslow Council.

Proposals for landscaping of the car park area have been drawn up but they would see a significant reduction in the number of spaces.

Cllr Biddolph criticised the survey on the grounds that it did not collect any data after 7pm when she said the demand for parking was highest.

She said, “Assessing parking need on non-peak demand is like removing most of the ski lifts at Val d’Isère because they’re not used in summer.”

The earlier survey only looked at the hours during which parking fees were paid to the council but she says usage tends to rise when charging ends.

Cllr Biddolph says she is lobbied ‘almost daily’ about the importance of car parking availability by Chiswick businesses whose customers need to drive.

As a result, she carried out a second snapshot survey on the evening of Friday 26 January asking users of the car park between 7.50pm and 9.50pm how much they had spent on their visit. An earlier survey she conducted had analysed spending habits during the day.

38 drivers agreed to participate with 15 refusing, 5 said they were just driving through the car park to have a look at the area and five left unable to find a pace.

Cllr Biddolph observed that most cars were occupied by more than one person drivers came from Acton, Barnes, Brentford, Brook Green, Chiswick (mostly Grove Park or Southfields), Ealing, Greenford, Hounslow, Isleworth, Kew, Northfields, north-west London, Richmond, Shepherd’s Bush and Sheen with one from Derby and another from Essex.

She says that by 6.50pm the car park was full with drivers having to wait for a space to become available, a pattern which continued until the end of the survey. When she left the area the car park was full with vehicles still arriving.

It was a very cold but clear evening and there was a comedy night on at the George IV and the pub itself was busy. Cllr Biddolph took photographs of the car park on the two preceding evenings showing that it was also full.

The two highest spends were £260 (food shopping, eating out, cinema tickets) and £150 (food shopping and eating out) and the two lowest spends were £4 (in a betting shop with a pay out of £12) and £1 (on chocolate after an emergency call-out to a store). The drivers surveyed said they had spent a total of £2,556, if the same average spend per car (£67) was assumed for all the vehicles park this would have resulted in a total expenditure of £6,188.

Drivers parked to shop for food and wine, to eat out or to grab a takeaway. One was collecting her teenage daughter from the store where she worked but did not spend here; another parked while seeing her daughter in a show at ArtsEd and did not spend. A delivery driver filled a van with deliveries from a food store to fulfil orders. One driver said they lived near to two Nandos in Hounslow but much preferred the one in Chiswick.

There was a brisk turnaround of motorbike and bike delivery couriers collecting orders from food businesses.

Cllr Biddolph said, “As the survey on a Friday evening showed, the night-time economy is extremely important to Chiswick. As photos taken that evening and on other evenings prove, the car park is similarly full. The car park was also full all day on the fourth Sunday in January when there was no market. All these hours were excluded from the co-commissioned survey. The measure shouldn’t be whether the car park has a value to Hounslow Council from car park charges but the value it has to Chiswick’s retail, hospitality and service economy. The co-commissioned survey was flawed.

“As for directing people to spaces on side roads, which the co-commissioned survey sees as the solution, the Bond Street car park was full throughout the survey time and residents of several nearby roads are petitioning to extend their CPZ hours so spaces will become even scarcer. The fact is that parking must be easy, not a confusing set of signs and directions to out of sight roads which might not have empty spaces. If parking in the central car park is reduced as proposed, it will put off people who want to spend their money here. They will spend it in other retail areas, to Chiswick’s huge disadvantage. Chiswick has been a destination since Roman times. We should celebrate and support that, not deliberately damage its success and survival.”

Hounslow Council’s stated policy is to maintain the overall parking spaces in the borough’s town centres and, if spaces need to be removed, an attempt is made to create new spaces elsewhere. The various Streetspace measures implemented over the last few years have resulted in the suspension of some parking bays but the council says that the overall loss in Chiswick is less that 5%.