A new study by Vanarama shows that the UK white van delivery fleet is somewhat in crisis. (Tell us something we don’t already know).
We can all relate to the continual difficulty in finding places to park while we drop off our deliveries. But, as traffic and the parking situation worsens across the UK, the pressure on delivery drivers to make more deliveries each day has grown to a whopping expected daily delivery rate of 150 parcels per van.
In the UK, 5.82 million small businesses depend on van drivers to deliver to them or on behalf of them to get their work done. With 1.2 million parking spaces in the UK, there are 3.24 million van drivers needing to use them (let’s not forget about regular road users too). The maths simply doesn’t stack up.
The report shows that over half a million of you struggle to find parking, typically taking over 20 minutes to find a spot to park for each delivery and in total, you each waste around 1 hour 40 minutes of each day in the hunt for somewhere to park your van. This costs the UK economy over £76 billion each year. Many drivers frequently risk parking tickets simply because they don’t have time to find an alternative option, with the pressure to get those deliveries done. And for those that do find somewhere legal to park, quite often, the space isn’t big enough for their van to fit, an issue now shared by many car drivers, thanks to the popularity of large 4×4 vehicles.
If you take the number of van users in the UK (3.25 million), and the time it takes to park them each day, that adds up to combined 6.99 billion (yes, billion) hours wasted each year, looking for parking.
So, what’s the solution? Well, as the study concludes, the fact is that more commercial vehicle parking needs to be created up and down the country, particularly in high street locations. But who is going to do it? What is really needs is one or two forward-thinking towns to step up and create the spaces and prove that doing so has a positive impact on illegal parking, congestion and pollution. Only then will there be a case for others to follow suit.