Seventy cars, and several million viewers.
Timed entry to the farm shop is not a queue management fashion. It is arithmetic, and the number doing the arithmetic is the car park rather than the shop.
Why the car park is the binding constraint and the shop is not.
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The shop holds about forty people before it stops being a shop.
Forty is uncomfortable and about sixty is unpleasant. A retail unit of this size could realistically turn over two hundred people an hour if they arrived evenly and left promptly.
They do not arrive evenly. They arrive in cars.
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Seventy cars, at 2.4 people a car, arriving for four hours.
That is about a hundred and seventy people on site at any moment if the car park is full and nobody leaves, against a shop that is unpleasant at sixty. The queue is not a marketing device and never was. It is the physical consequence of a car park that fills at half past nine.
The interesting number is dwell time. A visitor who stays ninety minutes occupies a space through three shop-loads of people. That single figure decides the whole day.
The queue is not demand. It is dwell time multiplied by seventy.
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So a timed slot is really a parking slot.
Every timed-entry system that has worked on a rural site has been a car park booking wearing a different name. Ours would be the same: a two-hour window, one slot per vehicle rather than per person, and no gate on the footpath at all because a right of way is not ours to time.
Anybody walking, cycling or arriving by the bus goes straight in with no booking at any point, which is both correct and quietly the fastest way in.
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And the honest downside is that it makes a bad day worse for somebody.
A timed system converts a two-hour queue into a refusal at the gate. The total number of people served does not change. What changes is that the disappointment happens at ten past nine on a website rather than at eleven o’clock in the rain.
That is better, on balance, for almost everybody. It is not better for the family who drove from Leeds on the off chance, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
What a timed-entry system would and would not fix.
| Problem | Fixed? | Note |
|---|---|---|
| The queue at the road by 09:30 | Yes | Arrivals spread across the day rather than piling at opening |
| The car park being full | No | Still seventy cars. It is the same car park |
| Local traffic on the A361 | Partly | Spreading arrivals is the only lever anybody has |
| People being turned away | Moved, not fixed | From the gate to the booking page, which is kinder and no less final |
| Total visitors a day | No | Governed by the planning permission and the parking, not by a website |
| Walkers and cyclists | Not applicable | No booking required, ever. A right of way is not ours to ration |
| Bank holidays | Improved | It is the day the system earns its keep |
| February on a Tuesday | Irrelevant | You can park a bus. Timed entry would be off |
What a booking window would look like.
One slot per vehicle. Bring six people in a car and it is one slot. Arrive on foot or by bicycle and there is no slot at all.
Saturday13 September
Sunday14 September
Tuesday16 September
Pick a time and we will hold it for ten minutes. Hold a parking slot
This is a demonstration build. Nothing here books anything, no deposit is taken and no card details are collected at any point. Prices are indicative and are published so the arithmetic can be argued with. Slots would be free, and released a fortnight ahead.
The numbers behind it.
Booking would be free, and would stay free
A paid timed slot is a way of rationing by wallet, and on a site whose whole point is that anybody can walk up to a farm gate that is the wrong instrument. It would be free, capped at one slot per vehicle per week, and there would be a walk-up allocation held back for every session because somebody will always have driven a long way on the off chance.
Timed entry, at a glance.
Per vehicle
Not per person. Six in a car is one slot.
No slot on foot
Walkers and cyclists go straight in.
Two-hour windows
Because dwell time is the real number.
Free
And it would stay free.
Planning an actual visit.
When to come, when not to, and where to park if the car park has gone.
