Multi-level parking at the Broadwater Road bus station, at the heart of the town, is the obvious choice for concentrating and increasing parking facilities. However, what is proposed for the site is better described as a Travel Centre than a multi-storey car park.
The ground floor of the centre would comprise:

• a bus station with a comfortable waiting room housing a taxi desk, toilets and refreshments
• a place for setting down tourists and another for lorries to set down goods
• space for a shop such as Currys or Dixons which the town currently lacks.
• The first floor and the second floor of this building would be dedicated to car parking and the whole structure designed to create an attractive new feature in the town.

Increased parking in the Travel Centre allows removal of on-street parking in Market Place and The Hundred and enables the "shared surface" scheme, proposed in the Romsey Movement and Access study, to be implemented with no overall loss in parking facilities. Together with the signalisation scheme to ease the flow of traffic around the town and measures to reduce through-traffic which are also proposed in the study, the town centre environment would be radically improved.

It is shown that parking capacity at the proposed Travel Centre can be sufficient to permit closure of the Lortemore and Newton Lane car parks and still allow an overall increase in town centre parking. Eventually there would then be only two public parking areas in the town, Broadwater Road and the new Waitrose site.

The closure of Lortemore and Newton Lane car parks gives an opportunity to redevelop these areas so as to increase the depth of interest in the town. There would doubtless be many good ideas for the disposal of these sites but the following are proposed in this report:

At current rates the Lortemore site would sell for about £1.25m which could be used to help fund the new Travel Centre. The planning brief for this site would require a showpiece development of high density, no-car, low energy housing designed for people who want to live and shop in the town.

The Newton Lane car park is set in attractive surroundings and would make an excellent town garden perhaps incorporating a swing-park and outdoor eating area.