Parked car incident costs hit £1.25bn per year

Every year 700,000 motorists 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 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 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.

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, 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.