'I got trapped in a Manchester city centre NCP car park with 200 drivers'

My car got trapped in a city centre car park again. Although this time, I was trapped inside with it.

I seem to be spectacularly unlucky when it comes to Manchester city centre parking. A year or so ago I wrote about an incident when I managed to unwittingly park my car in one of the only city centre car parks that gets locked up at midnight - leaving me stranded in the early hours on my own without access to my car (and my house keys in the boot).

So I suppose at least this time I was trapped WITH my car and with all my keys and possessions with me. Not that any of this was much help when I realised I was pretty much stuck in the NCP Palace multi-storey on Whitworth Street earlier this month.

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Thankfully, it wasn't just me trapped with my car. Oh no, there was a whole queue of around 200 of us locked inside this NCP, desperately trying to work out how to get out.

We had all been at the neighbouring Palace Theatre you see, to watch a very good production of Chicago the musical, before all dashing, en masse, back to the NCP car park to drive home. As anyone who regularly uses this car park on a theatre night will know, the quicker you get back to your car, the less likely you'll get stuck in the snaking queue to get out.

I pride myself on my swiftness in legging it out of such things, and so it was that I was among the first in the queue to get out of the car park. Only there was a problem - because the cars in front weren't moving.

It soon became apparent that the car at the front of the queue could not get out of the car park. The large metal shutters, which now sit over the exit, will only open if some hidden camera reads your number plate and allows you out of the place.

It's all part of the new technology in NCP car parks, along with the whole ticketless parking concept that has driven many of us up the wall in recent years. Anyway, on this night I'm afraid the technology had spectacularly failed.

The woman at the front of the queue desperately tried to reverse and manoeuvre her car to get the sensor to lift the barrier, but it wouldn't work. I got out of my car to suggest we maybe try a different car moving towards the sensor to see if that would work. It did not work.

So what were we all supposed to do now? We all started looking around the walls, at the NCP posters, desperately trying to find an emergency contact number - there was none we could find.

I headed back to my car to try googling out of hours NCP numbers - again drawing a blank. I was wracking my brains of who to call to help, while starting to panic a bit that we'd all be stuck here for hours in a concrete prison of petrol fumey doom.

In the end it wasn't any of our brains, or endless googling, that solved this conundrum. Oh no, it was good old Mancunian brawn.

For one chap decided to take matters into his own hands and manually lifted the shutter so we could all escape, and very thankful for him we all were too. Out we flooded, onto the freedom of the cobbled Beaver Street (yes, that's what it is really called), to make our collective way home.

I'm writing about this now because, when I got home and started to mull over my experience, it really started to bug me. What if I had been alone in that car park late at night trying to get out?

Why on earth are there not clear instructions near the exit of this car park to help people with emergency contacts or a panic button if this sort of thing happened again?

There's no way I would have thought of just lifting up the metal gate with my bare hands, like the action man who did, and I'd be too scared anyway that I'd damage it and end up being pursued by NCP to pay for it.

Without any way of contacting the car park operators late at night, it would have been down to poor old GMP to come and assist eventually wouldn't it.

In years gone by you'd have a human sat in a kiosk dealing with this kind of thing. Or at least a button that you could press to a person in a central office somewhere who could try and buzz open a glitchy barrier.

I've raised the issue with NCP and in their response they've sincerely apologised. And the good news is, they're now responding to my concerns by adding MORE notices with emergency numbers at the NCP Palace car park exit.

A spokesperson for NCP said: "We sincerely apologise for the experience you described on November 4^th.

"We have looked back on our CCTV and can see that the car park was running smoothly until 22:06 when the shutter wouldn’t raise for a customer. This was due to a technical fault, which is extremely unusual.

"7 minutes later a customer broke open the shutter to let customers out. NCP does have staff operating around Manchester providing cover at all times, but we understand that customers weren’t able to locate the customer service number to inform the team of the issue.

"We do have signage in the car park, some of which, but not all, display the customer service number. The entrance board and the main terms and conditions board display the customer service number, but we can see that not all signs display this information.

"We will be adding signage at the actual exit displaying the number to contact if there is any problems, which will hopefully ensure that in the rare event that this should happen again, then the customer can alert our team who will be directed to visit the site immediately and help out."

I'm pleased that they're taking positive steps now to address this issue. But it makes me annoyed that so many things in life now are being replaced by technology.

We, as humans, seem to want to erase humans out of the functions in our lives. If there's a way technology can replace some human worker, then do it is the way it all seems to be going.

Being trapped inside a giant concrete box, with no means of getting out, brought this into sharp focus that night.

This relentless drive to making everything online, everything digital, is all very well until the machines go rogue isn't it. And you find yourself stuck inside a freezing cold NCP car park.