Some of this touches on the real economic value of park-and-ride stations. How much extra revenue does ScotRail actually get from providing 100 parking spaces? An annual season ticket from Dyce to Aberdeen is £720. 100 spaces * £720 is £72k a year.
Wikipedia says passenger numbers have been trending down for a while, even before Covid:
If all 100 spaces were used every day, that would be 36,500 passengers a year, or far less than what the station handles now.
It doesn't really seem that important for ScotRail to fix this problem for the sake of £72k or 35k passengers a year. I figure that they could contract a parking firm to install an ANPR system, but I doubt it makes financial sense. As soon as offshore workers know they'll be caught, they won't do it any more, so there won't be many fees. Parking management companies need to make money somehow and if you don't charge people for parking normally, then they need to get that money in fees from the site owner, or from being strict with fines when people do stay longer than allowed. With the bimodal distribution of parking here (either you're here for a day, or for three weeks), there won't be much opportunity to fine people. A lot of income comes from people staying for 3 hours and 10 mins when the limit is 3 hours only.
Going through the figures like this is really quite important. P&R schemes make sense when land is cheap - owned by the council or the railway already, and with no viable competing priorities. Providing them becomes a sort of best-effort exercise unless you have the sort of restrictions in place in London. In and around London, land near stations is expensive already, and drivers are willing to pay for parking as driving into London instead would be even more expensive. Things might change if Aberdeen does decide (or is forced) to implement a Workplace Parking Levy like what is proposed for Edinburgh and Glasgow.
