Phew - the phone has been ringing
off the hook today. There’s nothing like parking pricing to excite Aucklanders.
It seems anything that restricts our unfettered use of cars is an imposition
that we will resist at all costs.
The reality is usually something
quite different.
Yes, there is a parking proposal out there
that we have all been invited to comment on. So we should.
What do we think?
Well, we do know that there are
about 200,000 car movements in and around the CBD every day – more than the
entire population of our 4th largest
city – Hamilton. We have 2,800 on street carparks, so, something’s not going to
fit, and something’s got to give! We also know that the average stay for a
shopper is 1.5 hours. So why do we still have P15, P30 and P60’s in the city?
This offering is way out of date.
So what do we do?
Well we looked and liked (a lot) a
parking solution in San Francisco – go to www.sfpark.com to see how they do it.
There are a lot of similarities with
what Auckland Transport is offering. An open ended parking offer – stay as long
as you like… and of course you will have to pay for the
benefit. At the other end of the scale if you want to just drop in or
drop off, the first 10 minutes is FREE. The rates in between are graduated
to encourage you to stay… but not too long. Rather should I say, to move into a
car park building where the rates are way less.
It’s all about churn – making better
use of our available parking stock by turning it over more regularly, because
what we also know is that if there is something that everyone hates more than
paying for parking it is that there is no parking.
Which brings us to the issue of
charging after 6:00pm. The proposed charge is half the daily rate but it is a
charge nonetheless (currently it’s free in most areas of the City Centre,
with the exception of areas in the Viaduct). The problem with free is that it
is only free for the first person to get there who has absolutely no incentive
to move on, why would they – it’s free. In most instances it is evening workers
taking up the parking stock that our (and their) customers want.
There is a faction out there who
want to wind the clock back to a time when we had parallel parking on our main
street. Anyone born after 1930 knows that this is plain nuts and unsustainable.
So, what are we saying? It’s not
about gouging but more about making better use of our parking stock by
providing a flexible, easy to understand parking offer that is more relevant
to a high quality urban city.
Alex
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| The proposed parking zones for central city parking |
For more information about the parking proposal, see our summary here.
