A PUBLIC transport expert visited Worcester today - to raise serious doubts on park and ride as a way of tackling congestion.

Professor Graham Parkhurst said the likes of Worcestershire County Council should never have seen park and ride as a panacea for solving gridlock.

But he also insisted areas like south Worcestershire, where 28,370 homes could be built up to 2030, desperately need "essential" investment in buses, cycling and walking facilities to avoid matters getting worse.

Professor Parkhurst is a director at the Centre for Transport & Society, a research body gaining a growing reputation at the University of the West of England in Bristol.

He has looked into the impact of park and ride in key UK cities like Brighton, Norwich, Plymouth, York, Shrewsbury and Reading and says they do very little in reducing congestion, offering councils value for money or helping the environment.

Speaking at a County Hall meeting today, he said proper investment in buses does far more to get people out of cars.

His appearance, at the county council's economy, environment and communities scrutiny panel, comes after the Perdiswell park and ride was controversially axed in September.

"We should not be looking at park and ride as the 'one mile' solution - by that I mean people driving to one for the last mile in order to reach their destination," he said.

"When we did our research we found park and ride did intercept some car traffic, but because it created extra bus journeys it often did little for carbon reduction."

He said because so many park and rides are not backed up by quality bus services, cars often do elaborate trips "detouring around ring roads" to reach them, resulting in no overall congestion reduction.

He said although he "didn't expect the research to show it", in some cases they were so badly situated they added to traffic.

He said cities and towns would get far better returns by focusing on "express bus services" where buses get more priority lanes, genuine investment and extra support to become the travel of choice.

"A lot of the problems with transport policy is because we think about cities, but very few people actually live in cities, they live in urban areas - that is what we need to focus on," he said.

He told the committee he examined park and ride for Bath, and came to the conclusion it would only be a success if it came with "considerable investment" in buses stretching all the way out into areas people lived to eliminate the car aspect of it.

"If you did that, more people would use the buses, it would help more people get on the park and ride and potentially you'd get the subsidy down," he said.

During a Q&A Councillor Ken Pollock, the committee chairman, asked him if "edge of city" park and rides like Perdiswell could ever work.

"You may have seen we scrapped one park and ride (Perdiswell), nearly ended another and had plans for six at one stage but three or four were scrapped before they got started - can an edge of city park and ride work?"

Professor Parkhurst said it would depend on many factors like city centre parking charges, later adding that a better buses strategy is more important.

"There is value in park and ride, but it's not great enough to justify the cost," he said.

"Bus lanes work, in fact it is one of the few things in local transport that you can be sure will work."

He said councils would be "better off" investing in better bus routes further away from cities to reduce the need for car trips in the first place.

Since its closure the old Perdiswell park and ride, off John Comyn Drive, is now kept secure by big concrete bollards and huge metal fencing to keep trespassers like travellers out at a cost of £3,000 per month.

The loss-making sites cost taxpayers £296,870 last year and has declined in popularity for several years.

It was used more than 450,000 times in 2008, but last year it reached a record low of just 274,935.

The county council decided to axe the park and ride as part of a plan to save £1.6 million from public transport.

A previous plan to scrap its entire £3 million yearly buses subsidy was scrapped due to an outcry.

But the closure has been fiercely contested ever since, with shadow transport secretary Mary Creigh visited the site last month to call the decision "a disgrace".

But many people say bus routes around Worcestershire are not good enough or frequent enough, with the cuts making it worse.