G Day of Glasbury on Wye, Powys, thinks we should change the way to park (From Hereford Times)

G Day of Glasbury on Wye, Powys, thinks we should change the way to park

8:00am Sunday 29th July 2012 in Letters

I’VE been discouraged, by the council, from shopping in Hereford.

Will this improve when the new shopping centre opens? Only if they change the pay and display system.

As regular shoppers in Hereford, we frequently use the Widemarsh Street car park. We then walk into the centre of Hereford to shop. This week we were trying to find some shoes, a ‘summer’ raincoat and have something to eat in All Saints’ Church.

We paid for two hours’ parking, imagining that this would be long enough. Well, as things often do, they took a little longer than we had wished and after we had tried on a number of rain jackets time had moved on. We had gone over time at the car park. Panic was followed by Olympic high speed walking back to the car park, in the rain, up the stairs to find – yes, you guessed it – a council shopping discouragement notice.

It said: “Come to Hereford and spend your money in our struggling shops, and if you find it so enticing that you wish to spend more time and money here, we’ll make you walk all the way back to your car, in the rain, and then you can come back to the shops in the rain, or we will charge you an extra £25 for the privilege.”

Whereas, if we were able to pay on exit, we could stay as long as we liked and we’d just be charged more for the extra time we spent in the car park. The council gain, the shops gain and we gain.

Is it just me? It works out cheaper and more convenient for us to go all the way to Cardiff to shop.

G DAY, Glasbury-on-Wye, Powys.