You may be fortunate to work in a UK city whereby and you can quickly find a parking space or pay very little for the visit — making it very convenient to bring your car into the city centre. 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. Let’s take a deeper look at how parking can prove to be much more of a nightmare in one city compared to another. If you like numbers, you’ll enjoy the insightful research we’ve compiled about the topic.
Searching for a parking space can be time consuming in some cities
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.
| City | Population | Search time per year | Cost per driver | Cost if entire population could drive |
| London | 7,074,265 | 67 | £1,104 | £7,809,988,560 |
| Birmingham | 1,020,589 | 46 | £757 | £772,585,873 |
| Leeds | 726,939 | 47 | £772 | £561,196,908 |
| Glasgow | 616,430 | 40 | £660 | £406,843,800 |
| Bristol | 399,633 | 46 | £768 | £306,918,144 |
| Manchester | 430,818 | 41 | £688 | £296,402,784 |
| Edinburgh | 448,850 | 38 | £625 | £280,531,250 |
| Belfast | 297,300 | 56 | £928 | £275,894,400 |
| Cardiff | 315,040 | 44 | £737 | £232,184,480 |
| Southampton | 214,859 | 35 | £588 | £126,337,092 |
Exploring the cost of parking in the UK’s city centres
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.
| City | Population | Hourly 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 |
The UK’s most populated cities and the number of NCP car parking spaces
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.
| City | Population | Number of NCP car parks | Standard spaces | Number of people to space ratio | Disabled spaces | Number of people to disabled space ratio |
| London | 7,074,265 | 30 | 6,631 | 1,066 | 53 | 133,476 |
| Birmingham | 1,020,589 | 9 | 4,253 | 239 | 62 | 16,461 |
| Leeds | 726,939 | 3 | 1,468 | 495 | 60 | 12,115 |
| Glasgow | 616,430 | 6 | 2,207 | 279 | 17 | 36,260 |
| Sheffield | 530,375 | 9 | 3,056 | 173 | 47 | 11,284 |
| Bradford | 483,422 | 2 | 958 | 504 | 34 | 14,218 |
| Liverpool | 467,995 | 7 | 1,615 | 289 | 9 | 51,999 |
| Edinburgh | 448,850 | 3 | 1,847 | 243 | 20 | 22,442 |
| Manchester | 430,818 | 32 | 11,893 | 36 | 366 | 1,177 |
| Bristol | 399,633 | 6 | 2,081 | 192 | 15 | 26,642 |
Research piece provided by Vindis, a family run business and Audi car dealership, supplying new and used vehicles.