Huge increases in railway station car park charges

Motorists have been trapped by their own belief in the car as a personal freedom. It is actually the exact opposite and is their prison and they are going to be perpetually paying out more to get out of that same prison. It will only get worse. Planers encouraged developements of green field sites out of town which required cars to live a normal life. The car was becoming cheaper to buy so everyone was happy. the government have long since relaised that the motorist is now trapped by owning a car and cannot get out of it easily, so you just increase taxation endlessly. The councils are at it too with car parking, next you will find supermarkets charge you to park. It would only take one to start and the others would follow, I think it will come. Also be a economic growth to Cameron as you may need eastern european labour employed , cheaply of course, to patrol them. You see.

i am not a regular rail passenger and am fortunate enough to live within walking distance of my local station so i am not personally affected by these car park charges. however i find it completely unacceptable that when a commuter buys a season ticket, where they are paying in advance of using the service, complementary car parking is not included in the price. this is just another example where the car is treated as the enemy and is regarded as an easy target for income. i suppose the situation is exacerbated when the commuter also suffers an uncomfortable journey. it would be interesting to know how the cost of giving all commuters free parking would compare to the cost of HS2.

Another case of finding a captive audience and screwing them for every penny. In the days when we had a lot of trains and communities were smaller most people lived within walking distance of their local station. Communities grew and sprawled and stations disappeared. In order to use the train (a good thing) people had to take to buses or drive themselves to the station. Of course they had to leave their cars somewhere so they parked on the surrounding streets which sometimes caused congestion or annoyed local residents who thought they had the right to park on them. Councils responded with yellow paint but didn't think it was up to them to provide commuter parking. In the meantime bits of spare track and sidings were being ripped up and the railway companies gleefully turned the land into car parks. You can work out the rest. Bus services once privatised became less available. Commuter land spread further and further from the city centres and massive new housing developments were built to feed the commuter needs. Take the Medway towns as an example. These developments were not serviced by decent public transport so commuters took to their cars of course. So while we want travellers to use public transport, specifically the railways, there is no strategic plan to help them use the service.