In June we asked our readers to support the national Baywatch Campaign by surveying their local supermarket car park for disabled parking abuse. The results have now been calculated.
The overall level of disabled parking abuse across all supermarkets was 16%. In 2017, the last Baywatch Campaign found it was 18.5% and therefore this year’s results do show some improvement.
Across all of the supermarkets surveyed the average number of disabled bays provided (to the nearest whole bay) is 15 bays with 3 of them being abused, meaning that roughly 1 in 5 disabled bays at supermarkets are abused by somebody parking in a disabled bay without displaying a Blue Badge.
Looking generally at enforcement signage, we can see that 60% of the supermarkets surveyed had visible signage or other evidence that enforcement took place. When you isolate these supermarkets levels of abuse remained at 16%. However, the 40% that had no visible indication of enforcement taking place the percentage of abuse increased dramatically to 36%. This shows that using enforcement does decrease the levels of disabled parking abuse.
Read the full results, including which supermarkets were the worst offenders
