Furious drivers abandon vehicles as hundreds stuck for hours in car park
Hundreds of people faced misery after being stuck in a multi-storey car park for hours. Some motorists caught up in the chaos yesterday evening decided to abandon their cars at St David's car park in Cardiff, Wales, as vehicles could not move.
Some people started shouting and swearing due to the lengthy delays, a woman said. Nicola Warrick, her partner and children had travelled from Caerphilly to Cardiff to celebrate her son's ninth birthday. They say they had to give up plans to visit their grandparents to end the day with a birthday cake as they were stuck in a traffic jam going nowhere.
Motorists were also stuck in the car park over the Easter bank holiday weekend (Supplied)The family was blocked inside their car on the seventh story of the car park with the end of the celebration ruined, she told Wales Online. This morning, the car park wrote on social media: "The city centre was busier than usual yesterday and the traffic made it hard for cars to exit St Davids. Congestion and traffic lights outside the car park only allowed a few people to leave at a time. We appreciate this was frustrating and are sorry for the inconvenience."
A similar incident happened at the car park during the Easter bank holiday. Instead of grabbing a few bargains and a bite to eat and getting out again, visitors found themselves trapped in the car park for over three hours in some cases, unable to get out.
Things got so bad that some motorists also abandoned their cars altogether due to the chaos at the car park in the Welsh capital. The situation, which was a "standstill" at its worse, was only resolved late into Saturday evening.
Nurse fined parking ticket after working 13-hour shift - twice in same week
St David's said on social media that the gridlock was due to "the heavy congestion on the road the car park exits into" and the "council-controlled traffic lights" which it said were "still only letting traffic out of the car park very slowly". They added that they "asked the council to change the lights to prioritise letting people out of the car park".
Sarah Barnett was one of countless shoppers caught in the chaos, she pleaded with the car park to let her know when it was freed up, after taking an Uber home, so she could return for her car.
A 26-year-old woman, who had travelled to Wales for Easter from Brighton to surprise her family in the Vale of Glamorgan, said the situation in the car park was "mental". She had come to spend some time in the city centre before visiting her family.
She said she entered the car park at around 2.30pm and noticed drivers were queuing to exit the car park as she entered it. She said: "I thought: 'Oh, that's weird' but didn't think anything more of it." But by the time she arrived back in the car park just before 7pm she spotted there was "gridlock all the way up" the car park and people were beeping their horns and standing outside of their cars.
The long queue at the car park yesterday (MEDIA WALES)"We got to our car on level six and couldn't even back out of our spot," she said. "I knew someone on level seven and they'd told me they'd been there for an hour. There were people there with their kids in the car...it's absolute chaos. They've got security on the ramp letting one person through at a time, but there must be hundreds of cars all queuing.
"We walked past the exit to see if there was a traffic light issue, or an accident, and there was nothing. Traffic was moving fine...we couldn't see any reason why there was such an issue. I'm getting the train back home to see my family and we'll come back tomorrow to pick up the car. Because we've seen people tweeting that they've been there for three hours...I don't particularly want to sit in the car for three hours."
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
