What We Think About the Proposed Changes to City Centre Parking

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 4^th 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 This offering is way out of date.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 

The proposed parking zones for central city parking

For more information about the parking proposal, see our summary here.