Plan B for a full car park
Before you go
When the car park for your walk is full, the nearest other car park is usually full too. So for every walk we describe we look for a real plan B: places to park for the same walk that overlap as little as possible in our model, or, where none exist, a plain statement that there is none. It appears on each route page as the block headed “If the parking is full”.
We never say whether anywhere has room today. This is what exists, not what is free.
Why the nearest car park is the wrong answer
Around Grasmere village, 10 places to park sit between 32 and 645 m apart, and between them they serve 7 of the walks we describe. On a busy morning they fill for the same reason, so a list of the nearest alternatives is a list of the same problem.
How the places are chosen
A place to park is considered for a walk when:
- it is within 500 m of the walk’s line, for a round walk you can join part-way, or of its start, for a walk from one place to another;
- the walk from it to the line along mapped paths is no more than 1.5 km;
- and, of the places that pass both, we choose up to three that overlap as little as possible, trying each place in turn as the first, because you start from the car park nearest you, not the most independent one.
The block then says where each place joins the walk, how far that walk is and how much it climbs.
How much two places overlap is scored from the walks they share: the more of the same walks they serve, and the closer they are, the more they overlap. The closeness part fades to nothing at 5 km, and a small part comes from being the same kind of place at the same price. We measure this; we do not observe it. Straight-line closeness is used to rank the places and is never shown to you as a walking distance.
Each walk’s choices get one of three verdicts: they have low overlap when every pair scores under 0.40; medium overlap under 0.60; and above that, there is no real plan B here, which we say in those words. That means the candidates are too alike in this model, not that anyone has seen them full.
What the numbers say
On most routes there is no real plan B by car: on 101 of the 183 routes we publish, every place we know overlaps too much in this model, and on 22 more we know fewer than two places. We would rather say that than name a nearby place as if it were one. Where a bus runs, it is not limited by car-park space.
Of the 183 routes we publish, computed on 1 October 2026; the first three counts are the 161 routes with at least two candidate parking places.
The bus, which is not limited by car-park space
On 72 routes a bus stops within a kilometre of the start, and the block gives its last buses back, checked against the operator’s timetable. It still runs to a timetable and can be full or cancelled. A bus that gets you there but not back is not a plan: if the last bus would leave before a walker starting at 10:00 at a steady pace could be back at the stop, the block says the bus is not for this walk.
Leave the gate clear
75 of the places we list sit near a gate mapped in OpenStreetMap, and each carries one line: how far away the gate is, and to leave it clear. We do not know whose gate it is or how often it is used; leaving it clear is right either way.
What we do not know
- How many cars a place holds is known for 342 of our 1009 places to park. Where it is not, we say nothing about size.
- Whether anywhere has room today. Nobody counts most of these places, and we never imply they have room.
- Where it does not help. Seatoller and Tarn Hows have no fallback in our list at all: the places people most need a plan B are some of the places we cannot give one.
In the RoutePark app
The app does the same from a GPX file of your own walk: it reads the file on your phone, finds the walk among ours when at least 55% of your line lies within 130 m of one of our routes, and shows that route’s places to park. It keeps the list on your phone for use without signal, with the date it was kept. The fallback is on your phone, not your watch: if you want it on your watch too, load it at home the night before.
Find your walk and its plan B is in the block headed “If the parking is full”.
Questions
What is a plan B here?
Where else to park for the walk you planned, chosen so that the places overlap as little as possible in our model of the walks they serve. It is worked out for each route before you set off.
Why not just the nearest car park?
Because the nearest car parks fill for the same reasons. Around Grasmere, 10 places to park serve 7 of our walks between them and, in our model, every pair of them overlaps heavily.
Does it know if a car park is full?
No. We never say whether anywhere has room today: this is what exists, not what is free.
What if my route has no plan B?
Then we say so. On 101 of the 161 routes with at least two candidate parking places, the candidates overlap too much in our model, and the page says there is no real plan B rather than invent one: the places are too alike, not seen full. The other 22 routes have fewer than two places we know.
Does it work without signal?
The app keeps the parking list on your phone once opened with signal, and a walk you keep opens without it, with the date it was kept.
Can I get there by bus?
On 72 routes a bus stops within a kilometre of the start, and the block gives its last buses back, checked against the operator's timetable.
Where the numbers come from
The places to park: our parking list, with a checked date on every entry (Lee’s visits, operators’ pages and OpenStreetMap). The routes: their GPX files. The scores and verdicts: the same code that writes each route’s block, run on every build. The bus rows: the operators’ timetables, with Lee’s sign-off per stop. The gates: OpenStreetMap contributors, read 9 August 2026. Every figure on this page is computed from those files when the page is built, last on 1 October 2026.