Greens and BRF fight it out for parking space
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by Guy Sheppard • Parking spaces for lorries take up a bigger area of the UK than Bristol, according to the Council for the Protection of Rural England.
Assuming each lorry has a space at its home base and at its potential destination, the total area covered is 125km2.
However, the council says space for car parking is three and a half times greater.
It claims that when road space is taken into account as well as parking, each car and truck accounts for at least 160m2 of concrete.
The research was commis sioned as a contribution to the national debate on future transport policy called for by trans.
port secretary Brian Mawhinney.
Paul Everitt, assistant direc. tor of the British Road Federation, describes the figures as "pure scaremongering". He says: "It is good fun with a calculator but does not provide a big input into defining where transport policy should go."
The BRF says that if the government's entire road building programme was completed, it would only take up a further 0.1% of the UK's total land area.