Hereford’s could get a new “park and ride” scheme as part of a radical shakeup of car parking in the city and the wider county. But the wisdom of this has been questioned.
Herefordshire Council’s draft Parking Strategy 2026-2041 proposes that the city’s new Southern Link Road (SLR), also known as Phase 1 of the bypass, should have a park and ride facility to ease city traffic.
This would mean working with bus operators to ensure “frequent, reliable and convenient” services to and from the city centre, the strategy says.
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The council is looking at ways to ensure such journeys would be quicker than driving in and out by car, such as giving buses priority at junctions, smart traffic signalling, and even “selective road space reallocation where appropriate”.
Hereford already has several “park and choose” sites where drivers can swap their cars for bikes, including the council’s Beryl bikes.
Under the strategy, the council will also expand these into “flexible community mobility hubs, offering walking and cycling connections, carshare options, and links to public transport”, and to include more of these in new developments.
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The council appeared to kill off the long-touted park-and-ride idea last autumn, when Cabinet member for transport Coun Philip Price claimed it was “not a viable option” for Hereford.
Campaigner and Herefordshire Transport Alliance spokesperson Liz Morawiecka, also previously sceptical of attempting park-and-ride schemes in the city, expressed surprise at the inclusion of the idea now.
“I thought they had agreed that this requires too much subsidy and Hereford doesn’t have the critical mass to make it viable, particularly as they have always highlighted that the Belmont and Ross Roads lack the carriageway width for separate bus lanes,” she said.
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Yet such lanes “are needed to make people transition from their individual car to a bus service which will get them to their destination faster”.
“Park-and-choose sites that link with existing bus services in and out of the city and the market towns, and also with safe walking and cycling networks, offer more choice and lower running costs,” she suggested.
Work on the SLR, to run between the A49 and A465 southwest of the city, is due to start at the end of this year.
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