The Liverpool Echo this week reported that Liverpool City Council has confirmed its plans to extend the hours of operation of the city centre’s “Controlled Parking Zone” from the current 8am–6pm, to the new, longer 7pm–11pm period. This will affect not only the chargeable period for on-street pay-and-display parking spaces and resident parking spaces, but also the hours during which you are not allowed to park on single yellow lines.

The change, set to take effect in June, will also limit parking hours on a number of spaces in the Georgian Quarter, to stays of 4 hours with no return within 1 hour.

The decision was made at a meeting of the City Council’s Highways and Public Spaces committee on 1st May 2025, and while minutes from the meeting have not yet been published, the agenda and supporting documents for the meeting show the council’s reasoning for extending the controlled parking period. They note that, although both informal and formal public consultations showed ~90% opposition to extended hours, “the growth and development of the city centre since the CPZ was first introduced” has led to increased on-street parking post-6pm, and “significant pressure on highway capacity and available road space”. They say this is only expected to get worse when the new Everton Stadium at Bramley Moore Dock is in full operation, saturating parking in the north of the city centre on match days.

“Traffic often circulates the area looking for available parking spaces with a resultant impact on congestion, air quality and road safety” the Council report says. “When no suitable spaces are available, this results in vehicles parking on single yellow lines which can cause obstruction issues for both traffic and pedestrians as parking also takes place on footways.”

The Highways committee argued that the changes will “support, complement and help to enable other initiatives and measures to encourage [a] modal shift away from private car dependency, along with improvements to road safety and air quality”. Despite the low public support, they argue the change “is intended to achieve a balance between the various parking demands of users, including those of residents who often are unable to find places to park near to their home whilst also allow parking opportunities for visitors. This proposal will also help to tackle the problems of footway parking outside of the existing operational hours and traffic from vehicles circulating to find available spaces.”