When you drive to an area, regardless of whether you know it well or not, one of the first things that you’ll want to do is to find somewhere to park. Normally, you will walk up to a parking meter and pay your money, often having to put a ticket up in your window in order to show that you’ve got the right to park there without getting a fine. Recently, though, more and more towns and cities across the United Kingdom have been moving towards smarter ways to pay. That is what Guildford is doing, but what will that mean for drivers looking to park in the town and not knowing how to?
What’s Happened
Surrey County Council has decided to change the infrastructure that it offers, which will include altering the way in which drivers pay for their parking across the county. If you drive into Guildford, then you will soon notice that many of the on-street pay and display machines for parking that have been there for years have now been switched off. That means that they are out of service and can’t be used by anyone, which is part of the County Council’s drive towards getting people to use an app to pay for their parking instead. By the beginning of April, two-thirds of the machines were out of order.
If you want to ensure that you are obeying the traffic laws, you will have to use the ‘RingGo’ application, which is available on both Apple and Android devices. The Council decided to make the move when it realised that around 70% of payments for parking tickets were being made via the app anyway. The fact that many of the pay and display machines around the town are old means that they are also both difficult and costly to repair, meaning that maintaining them is less useful than it seems to be worth for the Council, costing more to collect any money from them than they make.
A Cost-Saving Exercise
As is so often the case when a local Council decides to do pretty much anything at all, the decision to stop the use of the pay and display machines is a cost-cutting exercise. A Surrey County Council spokesperson said,
We will be updating the pay and display machines around the town centre over the next year and reducing the overall number, which will save money. To help us decide which machines should be replaced, and the best locations to replace them, we have switched off about two-thirds, leaving 15 coin payment machines spread evenly around the town centre.
The Council is looking for feedback from drivers, saying, “The feedback we receive about this over the coming months will help us decide which machines to replace.” If you want to know which machines have been turned off and where you will need to use the RingGo app if you have parked, you can turn to the Council’s website and view an app that outlines all of the decisions. All of the out-of-service machines will also have information about how to download and use the RingGo application, with two locations in Guildford only allowing payment via the app.
Where You’ll Need to Use the App
The changes brought in by the council mostly affect the town centre, especially the High Street, but they do also go to York Road and Castle Hill. In many of the locations, there will at least be one or two pay-and-display machines working, so you can use whichever one is the nearest to you. Parking machines are in place at the following locations (at the time of writing – May 2025):
- Leapale Lane
- Dene Road
- Martyr Road
- North Street
- High Street
- London Road
- Jenner Road
- Harvey Road
- Pewley Hill
- South Hill
- Millbrook
- Millmead
Although most people will be au fait with using applications on their mobile phones, some would prefer to use a website in order to make a payment. If that is the bracket that you fall into, then you can head towards the RingGo site in order to do just that. It is used around the United Kingdom in areas other than just Guildford, so it is proven to work and will simply require you to open an account, put in your number plate and select where it is that you have parked. Machines normally have identification on them that you can then select to ensure that you won’t get a ticket.