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Released: 7th July 2008

Parked car incident costs hit £1.25bn per year
 - London is capital of parking prangs
- 1 in 5 of all road accidents involves a stationary vehicle

Every year 700,000 motorists 1 shunt, scrape or prang another parked car, leaving innocent UK drivers with an estimated £1.25bn repair bill, according to new research by accident management specialist, Accident Exchange.

Analysis of more than 100,000 accidents 2 between 2006 and 2008 revealed that around one in five of all reported road incidents involved damage to a parked vehicle. With the cost of repair averaging £1,800, about 80 percent of these Parked Car Incidents (PCIs) occurred on the street and the remainder in public car parks.

London topped the twenty five worst cities in Britain for PCIs, followed by Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester and Norwich completing the Top Five.

Nearly 1 in 10 'parked car' crashes handled by Accident Exchange were recorded in the Capital, resulting in an annual repair bill of £119m.

In comparison, with only 197,000 registered cars in the city, Glasgow drivers racked up an annual repair bill of £23.8million making it the second worst parking spot in the UK.

Contributing factors to the PCI problem are increased congestion on residential streets and competition for car park spaces. In the last ten years the average number of cars per UK household 3 has jumped from 1.3 to an estimated 1.6 with the number of households and cars increasing by around 220,000 and 1m per annum respectively.

Worst 25 cities for Parked Car Incidents (PCIs) - source AccidentExchange.com

  Annual Repair Bill Cars Registered in
DEC 20074
London £118,742,400 2,588,000
Glasgow £23,839,200 197,000
Birmingham £23,688,000 1,264,000 1
Manchester £16,228,800 1,140,000 2
Norwich £14,263,200 428,000 3
Oxford £12,902,400 324,000 4
Bristol £10,785,600 187,000
Liverpool £10,231,200 523,000
Newcastle £10,080,000 391,000 5
Coventry £9,576,000 Not Available
Leeds £9,273,600 912,000 6
Leicester £8,769,600 134,000
Wolverhampton £8,467,200 Not Available
Nottingham £8,064,000 84,000
Derby £7,912,800 112,000
Cardiff £7,509,600 134,000
Cambridge £7,308,000 304,000 7
Sheffield £6,854,400 535,000
York £6,400,800 78,000
Durham £6,199,200 217,000
Portsmouth/Soton £5,896,800 179,000
Edinburgh £5,392,800 159,000
Bradford £4,990,200 Not Available
Swindon £4,989,600 118,000
Cheltenham/Gloucester £4,687,200 Not Available

1 Figures for W. Midlands Metropolitan Area
2 Figures for Greater Manchester Metropolitan Area
3 Figures for Norfolk
4 Figures for Oxfordshire
5 Figures for Tyne and Wear Metropolitan Area
6 Figures for W. Yorkshire Metropolitan Area
7 Figures for Cambridgeshire

"The problem is only set to get worse," predicts Steve Evans, chief executive of Accident Exchange.

"The number of vehicles on Britain's roads has swelled by almost 10m over the past decade 5, leaving 35m motorists competing for an estimated 2.2m car park spaces today."

Evans cites the expansion of residential permit areas, more cars per household, new inner city developments offering just one space per dwelling and modern cars being bigger and wider, as just some of the reasons behind the scale of the PCI problem.

"The real fear is that one day soon, we will have PCI hot spots where nearby residents could even be priced out of insuring their vehicles," adds Evans.

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For further information please contact Andy Francis at Performance PR on 0208 541 3434 or 0787 981 3639 email: andy@performancepr.com


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