There will be high interest in Hutt City Council’s draft Parking Strategy when it’s released in September.
There are plenty of challenges. We know we’ll lose around 700 carparks in the central city with Riverlink’s floodway improvements. Some suburban streets are choked with parked vehicles because – with the blessing of central Government legislation – developers of many of the new townhouses springing up everywhere have provided insufficient, or no, off-street parking.
Decades of policy and habit have turned us into a car-centric society. But 98% of the national fleet burns fossil fuels, and greenhouse gas emission reduction imperatives grow ever-more urgent – if for nothing else because we’ll have to buy billions of dollars’ of overseas carbon credits if we fail to meet our international climate change commitments.
More people are using public transport but there are big gaps in services. Mentioning cycleways triggers extreme reactions from a disappointingly high number of people.
Electric vehicles will be a big part of the solution in the future, as will shared vehicle schemes like MEVO. Parking arrangements – on and off-street – will have to accommodate this.
Councillors, reluctantly, agreed to an increase in paid parking fees, 9am-5pm 7-days, and from October to meter 300 parking spaces on Jackson St and the Peel St carpark (with some free spaces for library users in the latter).
That’s gone down like a cup of cold sick with families and businesses struggling with the cost of living crisis, but the alternative was another 1% on the already-too-high rates increase. The principle that car users (not every ratepayer/renter drives) should pay a share of the tens of millions of dollars of council’s annual transport operating and capital costs through parking fees weighed in.
There will be consultation on the wider parking strategy. It will look at everything from whether we should have ‘residents’ only’ parking like Wellington; business and delivery needs; how to better cater for those with mobility issues, even graduated/demand-responsive parking pricing.
There are reasons why the Government brought in rules blocking councils’ ability to require new housing developments to have off-street parking. It reduces housing costs and helps with transport mode shift. But in the Hutt, it has left ratepayers with a huge bill.
Biddle and Milne Cres., Johnston and Marina Gr., and more than 90 other streets need kerb and channel changes and other traffic management interventions to deal with parking, and rubbish truck and emergency vehicle access. The cost is $39m over the next decade, and there may not be an NZTA subsidy.
The new Government has not changed Labour’s rules on off-street parking, ostensibly buying into the mode-shift argument. Yet their new policy on transport prioritises building new roads.
Many residents consider the public road parking space outside their house is ‘theirs’, even when they have garages and driveways. But if we’re to have better/more buses, and to make it safer to cycle for kids and others, we may need that road space – at least on one side of the road.
Lots to think about.
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