Lake District National Park Authority car park payments, by hour (FOI/2026.500)

Contains public sector information provided by the Lake District National Park Authority and licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/
Republication as open data granted by the Authority on 1 October 2026. Please keep the credit line above, word for word, with any copy or use of these files.

What this is. Under FOI/2026.500 (Environmental Information Regulations) the Authority released the pay-and-display machine transactions for 19 of its car parks (1 September 2026) and its RingGo phone-payment sessions by zone, month and hour (2 September 2026). It declined to produce an hour-of-day report itself. The hourly tables here are hikes.guide's aggregation of the Lake District National Park Authority's data, not the Authority's: the Authority released the transactions and did not produce this analysis. Any error in it is ours.

Files (rows exclude the header and the '#' note lines; every CSV starts with those notes):

  ldnpa-ringgo-zone-month-hour.csv - RingGo sessions by zone, month and hour, as released (10,944 rows, 315 KB). The Authority's data as released.
    The Authority's RingGo extract in CSV form: every row of the workbook it released on 2 September 2026 (FOI/2026.500), with the same columns and values. Month is the first day of the month in the workbook, written here as YYYY-MM. Zones are numbers; the joined table names them.

  ldnpa-car-park-hourly-joined.csv - Transactions by car park, source, month and hour (joined) (16,488 rows, 723 KB). Our aggregation.
    Both halves in one long table: machine transactions counted from the released Flowbird ledgers, and RingGo sessions joined to car park names on the Authority's zone key. Columns: car_park, source (machine; ringgo; ringgo (not a machine car park) for Threlkeld Old Station), month (YYYY-MM), hour (0-23, the hour starting then), count, confidence, ringgo_zone.

  ldnpa-car-park-hourly.csv - Machine transactions by car park and hour (456 rows, 12 KB). Our aggregation.
    The machine half summed over every month: car_park, hour (HH:00, the hour starting then), transactions.

  ldnpa-ringgo-zone-hourly.csv - RingGo sessions by zone and hour (456 rows, 9 KB). Our aggregation.
    The RingGo extract summed over its months: parking_zone, hour (HH:00), sessions.

Read these before using a number:
  - A transaction is a paid ticket or a phone session, not a car and not a visitor. Permit holders and anyone who did not pay are not in it, and one stay can buy more than one ticket.
  - So every count is a floor on paid use, never a count of cars, people or spaces.
  - The pay-and-display machine series starts in August 2024: the Authority confirmed nothing earlier can be recovered. The RingGo series runs from April 2024 to March 2026.
  - The RingGo zone key (which zone code is which car park) came from the Authority on 4 September 2026; the Authority confirmed Hawkshead 37317, Beech Hill 37302 and New Dungeon Ghyll 37308 on 14 September 2026.
  - Hour of day for the machines is the time the ticket was bought at the machine (Flowbird 'Terminal Date'), not the time the machine reported it.

More, and the same credit: https://hikes.guide/data.html#ldnpa-car-parks
Corrections: https://hikes.guide/contact.html