The simple trick that could save YOU £220 a month on your parking bills – and the cheapest city revealed
CITY centre parking fees continues to soar with prices hitting as much as £9 a hour in London.
And drivers in other major cities are having to fork out stratospheric fees to park their cars, too.
But motorists can slash their monthly bills by up to £220 a month by parking just HALF a mile outside the centre, a study has shown.
Over the course of a year that's enough to pay for a luxury holiday - or a deposit on a new car.
Analysis of parking rates by found drivers in Manchester, Cardiff and Leeds can benefit the most from leaving their cars just 0.6 miles away.
At all cities outside the capital - where drivers can't save from widening the net - huge savings can be made from just walking an extra 10 minutes.
Monthly bills for Manchester parking falls from £302.20 to £79 while Leeds - the priciest place outside of London to park per month - drops from £355.40 to £192.02.
Data was collected from over 200 car parks taking into account rates for Monday to Friday during an average working day.
It found Birmingham had the cheapest city centre parking at just £148.20 a month - although this can still be sliced by almost £100 by parking further afield.
The North East is best for drivers' wallets when it comes to parking with hourly rates available for as little as 79p in Sunderland and £1.72 in Newcastle.
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Fernando Garcia, consumer marketing director at HPI Check, said: "Parking in the UK’s major cities can be very expensive, the cost for one hour can be high, but staying for longer than a few hours can mean that prices quickly jump into the double figures.
"We also wanted to analyse how much people could be saving if they were to locate just a small distance away from the city centre.
"What’s interesting to see is the costs of some of the northern cities, with Leeds the second highest for the whole country and workers in the city expecting to pay over £300 during a calendar month.
"However, when we look at the savings that could be made when moving just slightly outside the city centre, Leeds again is the perfect example of this by simply moving just a mere 0.6 miles outside.”
