THE first phase of a pioneering £1.5 million queue-busting traffic system has been launched in York.

The first elements of City of York Council's trail-blazing Traffic

Congestion Management System (TCMS) went live yesterday when Coun Tracey Simpson-Laing, the council's executive member for transport, unveiled one of the new car park variable message signs in Lord Mayor's Walk.

The signs, at key locations, will give motorists early warning if a car park is full and where alternative parking is available.

The car parking feature will eventually be linked into a central computer utilising sophisticated technology to process a range of other information - such as traffic flows, and where roadworks are.

It will provide a better analysis of where and why traffic queues are occurring, and be able to deal more quickly with unexpected issues such as the impact of an accident or a breakdown.

Coun Simpson-Laing said: "Residents have been telling the council for some time that the amount of car parking in the city centre was inadequate. Recognising just how important car parking is to the economy of the area we undertook a study into ways of increasing capacity.

"The results of that work astonished us as it found that on most days over 50 per cent of our parking spaces are empty. The problem most of the time is not that there is a lack of space, but that motorists simply don't know where the spaces are."

The new system will automatically count vehicles in and out of every one of the council's car parks and tell a central computer how much spare capacity there is and where it is.

That information will then be shown on a network of 24 signs located around the inner ring road. A special website will be available later in the year to provide car parking and traffic information to those at home.

The first part of the new system will be fully completed by the end of May in time for the busy part of the year and will be followed over the next 12 months by a connection to each of the city's five Park&Ride sites and the installation of variable message signs on the outer ring road.

Updated: 08:47 Saturday, March 22, 2003