The parking nightmare for patients and visitors at York District Hospital could finally be solved - through the construction of a new car park deck.

The York NHS Trust has submitted plans to build a single-storey deck above much of the existing main parking area in front of the hospital.

The project would create an extra 233 spaces for patients and visitors on top of the current 305-space car park.

Health chiefs say the current situation, which often leaves motorists queuing in Wigginton Road while they wait for a parking space, cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely.

The Evening Press reported some years ago how the problems were building up, particularly on afternoons when in-patients' visitors vie with out-patients for parking spaces. As a result, out-patients who had not allowed enough time to park their cars often ended up late for their appointments.

Deputy chief executive George Wood said the hospital was continuing to take more patients, and they were coming from further afield as well. "Outpatients are going up. Day care patients are going up," he said.

The trust had taken various steps to reduce car usage. It had, for example, laid on a minibus service for staff to use when coming to work.

But the extra parking deck seemed the only realistic medium to long term solution to the problem of rising visitor and patient numbers.

The proposal had been submitted to City of York Council at an early stage to explore its feasibility, and he sought to quash any hopes that the extra parking deck might be built within a matter of months.

He declined to speculate on how much it would cost, but confirmed that such schemes could be "quite expensive".

He said revenue from parking charges would be an important element in the financing of the parking deck.

Steve Vollar, of consulting engineers Hill Cannon, who have been investigating the feasibility of the extra parking deck, said the deck would cover about two thirds of the existing car park, and extensive landscaping would reduce any visual impact.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.