Extension of tram park and rides scrapped amid rise in home working

The Phoenix Park tram stop
-Credit: (Image: Google Street View)


The extension of two Nottinghamshire tram park and ride sites by hundreds of spaces has been scrapped due to the rise in home working. The Hucknall and Phoenix Park stations, the latter being located near Bulwell, could have had an extra 800 spaces between them.

NET, the operator of the city's tram network, operates seven park and ride sites and there are 5,000 spaces across all of them. The Hucknall park and ride currently has 439 spaces, whilst Phoenix Park has 657.

These numbers will remain the same after Nottingham City Council agreed with the government to scrap expansion plans. The council, together with Derby City Council, had secured £161 million from the Department for Transport in 2019 under the 'transforming cities fund'.

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The fund had been established to allow councils to invest in public transport improvements and improve transport links more broadly. It was for Nottingham City Council to decide where the money should go, with 35 different projects initially agreed.

This has now been reduced to 33 after many projects became more expensive due to soaring inflation. A new city council report, being presented at a meeting on Monday (September 30), explains: "There have been a number of challenges associated with the delivery of the programme, including impacts from the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which had a significant impact on material supply, energy and construction costs, as well as delivery timescales.

"This resulted in the need to review some of the proposals that were originally approved." Two projects have therefore been scrapped, with the park and ride expansions being one of them.

The other scrapped project is an upgrade to cycle connections between Nottingham and Derby, towards the East Midlands Airport. Explaining why the park and ride expansions are not going ahead, the new report says: "The Covid pandemic significantly impacted on the use of public transport, with changes to working patterns and a greater uptake of hybrid working resulting in people commuting less frequently, reducing the overall demand for park and ride."

The money that would have gone on the two scrapped projects has been reallocated to some of the other 33 that have become more expensive. Twenty one schemes in Nottingham's programme have already been completed, with the council now entering the final year for the majority of works.

The final scheme is the new pedestrian and cycle bridge over the River Trent, for which construction is set to start in early 2025. Although acknowledging that working patterns had changed, bosses have previously rejected the idea that hybrid working presents an existential crisis for Nottingham's tram network.

Chief operating officer at NET, Andrew Conroy, previously said: "There's no sense that customers are voting with their feet, there's a distinct loyalty towards the trams and I think the people of Nottingham are particularly proud of the fact that they have a tram network." Nottingham projects already completed under the transforming cities fund include the introduction of bus lane enforcement cameras, now in place at four locations at a cost of £60,000.