Head to some cities in the UK and you’ll quickly find a parking spot or pay next to nothing for the visit — if anything at all. For other cities though, you could end up driving around for ages trying to locate one space or put quite a few pound coins into the ticket machine for the privilege. Audi dealership Vindis has looked at how parking can prove much more of a nightmare in one city compared to another by compiling the following insightful research about the topic…

Time spent searching for a parking space

Using data gathered from a study carried out by end-to-end parking solution specialists INRIX and reported on by The Sun, the following table reveals how long people spend on average each year searching for a parking space in some of the UK’s largest cities. It also details the cost that this search has on each driver when factoring in time, fuel and emissions, as well as the overall cost if the entire city’s population could drive.

CityPopulationSearch time
per year
Cost per
driver
Cost if entire
population
could drive
London 7,074,26567
£1,104
£7,809,988,560
Birmingham1,020,58946 £757
£772,585,873
Leeds726,93947 £772
£561,196,908
Glasgow616,43040 £660
£406,843,800
Bristol399,63346
£768
£306,918,144
Manchester430,81841 £688
£296,402,784
Edinburgh448,85038 £625
£280,531,250
Belfast297,30056
£928
£275,894,400
Cardiff315,04044 £737
£232,184,480
Southampton214,85935 £588 £126,337,092
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Cost of parking in city centres across the UK

In the next table, we have taken a look at how much it costs to park in various cities throughout the UK, based on information collated by vehicle history check service HPI Check. The organisation based its findings on the cost of parking in a city centre for an hour on a typical working day, between 9am and 5pm, and is an average price of parking from all car parks found in each city. From these statistics, we have calculated how much could be made from parking per hour if the entire city’s population was able to drive.

CityPopulationHourly cost
of parking
Cost if entire
population
could drive
London
7,074,265
£9.10
£64,375,811.50
Leeds
726,939
£3.06
£2,224,433.34
Glasgow
616,430 £2.65
£1,633,539.50
Manchester
430,818 £3.18
£1,370,001.24
Liverpool 467,995
£2.59
£1,212,107.05
Sheffield
530,375
£2.14
£1,135,002.50
Cardiff
315,040
£3.14
£989,225.60
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
282,338
£1.72
£485.621.36
Sunderland 294,261 £0.79 £232,466.19

Number of NCP car parking spaces in the UK’s most populated cities

For the following table, we have analysed how many car parks there are from the National Car Parks (NCP) in each of the ten most populated cities across the UK, as ranked by City Mayors Statistics. We have also recorded the number of standard spaces and disabled spaces that there are across each of the city’s NCP car parks, before working out the space to person ratio (all numbers rounded down) if the entire city’s population could drive.

CityPopulation Number
of NCP
car
parks
Number
of people
to space
ratio
Disabled
spaces
Number
of
people

to
disabled
space
ratio
London
7,074,265
6,631
1,066
53
133,476
Birmingham
1,020,589
4,253
239 62 16,461
Leeds 726,939
1,468
495
60 12,115
Glasgow 616,430
2,207 279
17 36,260
Sheffield 530,375
3,056
173
47 11,284
Bradford
483,422
958
504
34 14,218
Liverpool
467,995
1,615
289 9 51,999
Edinburgh
448,850
1,847 243 20
22,442
Manchester
430,818
11,893 36 366
1,177
Bristol 399,633 2,081 192 15 26,642
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