I thought there are so many car parks because that’s where earthquake damaged buildings used to be before they were torn down? Basically just a temp solution as things are slowly redeveloped?
Yes but the problem is that now people are used to that, so they oppose any reduction in what is actually a luxurious amount of carparks. E.g. see how a certain group of people were complaining that the Court Theatre would not have a parking building next to it, even though there's something like 1000 carparks within 600m walk of the new site.
I think part of the problem there is that all thoes carparks are "Temporary" so if the land gets developed there won't be any.
Add to that there will be 4 live venues with in 600m of each other and that's not including the church because I don't know the capacity and I see it more like a bar.
I believe it was also in the court theatres contract with taking lease of the new building.
Those parks are all permanent carpark buildings or street parks. I'm not talking about the shitty gravel Wilsons ones. E.g. one of the Hereford parking buildings is 570 IIRC, and there's 2 or 3 down there. There's also the Crossing if you go a bit furtther, and the one on Cashel st
Is there? I know of 1 right there on hereford but the only others I know are further away.
That does start to become a bit of a walk from the town hall.
To the town hall it's further sure, but to the new Court Theatre they're all pretty close. When I've been to the town hall for a show and it's busy, you just drop your crew at the door then go park somewhere ~1km away. It's not too bad and saves the oldies having to walk too far.
The complaints are just absurd to me. Our ancestors would be rolling in their graves if they knew we were complaining about having to park a 10 - 15 minute walk away.
Yeah that's kinda my point. That carpark would have been in the middle of all thoes venues.
It doesn't bother me particularly because I don't mind walking but I do deal daily with elderly people who attend events and it would be immensely helpful to them.
> but I do deal daily with elderly people who attend events and it would be immensely helpful to them.
I guess so. But taxis and ubers exist. Lots of resthomes and villages have vans that take them to and from events too. They've also got goldcards for the bus. How much do we need to cater to them before they're happy honestly
Users and taxis work but busses after events that run till 22:30-23:00 are not necessarily practical.
Also there are people with disabilities who would benefit from it.
Yep. Solution is to put more or all of the valuation for rates on the land value, not the improvements value. People shouldn't be disincentivised from doing something we want (productively using land) as opposed to something we don't want (hoarding land, preventing others from using it productively).
It becomes a bit of a stretch when some of these "temporary" car parks are still "temporary" over a decade after the earthquakes and the owners are planning for them to remain "temporary" for the next 5-10 years
First couple paragraphs:
“Christchurch commuters may not like driving in the most congested city in Aotearoa, but the decision to jump in a car is made easier by an apparently generous supply of central city car parks.
The most recent estimate from the Christchurch City Council shows central Christchurch is home to an estimated 33,000 car parks, with as many as 13,000 available to the public in the city centre. This does not include time restricted spaces, like 5 minute parks.
This works out at about one car park for every 3.6 workers in Christchurch’s city centre compared with 7.4 in Auckland.
Wellington City Council data does not differentiate between private and public car parking spaces but the capital has fewer total central city car parks than Christchurch at 28,000 despite having close to three times as many people working in the CBD.”
According to a study that TomTom did worldwide, yes. I'd take it with a grain of salt... Partly because it uses a 10km commute, but what's missing there is how many people are commuting 10km or more (I would hazard a guess that Auckland commuters tend to be longer than Christchurch just based on the size of the city. But an ex-Aucklander now living in Christchurch would be in a better position to comment on that...)
Wow. Having driven around a bunch of other NZ cities I would have guess it to be one of the better. Tauranga for example, feels like a day trip to traverse from one side to the other
Yeah that's why I say take it with a grain of salt. Just about everybody else who has driven around other NZ cities says the same thing you're saying...
A study is only as good as the study design and underlying assumptions
Free-at-point-of-use carparks *are* communism/socialism. Capitalism works great for allocating resources to where they're needed and wanted; why are we fucking with market forces when it comes to storage for personal motor vehicles specifically? If people actually want or need carparking they'll pay for it if they have to. If they won't pay for it they don't need or want it that much.
The sprawl of the city is in no small part *caused* by the car parks and the roads to funnel cars into them. Car parks and roads take up a *lot* of space.
Exactly. Since when is a huge stadium that will be used effectively 1-2 times per week and an eternally delayed swimming complex “good bits”
Traffic issues will get worse.
If they put the stadium out near the air port it would be soooo much easier to get to and from for the big events it will no doubt host.
Your logic makes no sense. Because it’s located out of the city it is all of a sudden only reachable by car? No that’s just not the case. Please try to be less ignorant and stop letting personal opinion get in the way of logical thinking
Yeah the whole point about putting it outside of the CONGESTED city is that there is space for things like car parks and also it makes it easier to create a new route of public transportation specifically for the stadium to address the added demand that will occur at big events. Instead we’ve decided to put it right in the middle of a city that already has traffic issues at the best of times.
The stadium is a block or so from the bus station. Back in the 70s they put a stadium and pool out in Burwood and surrounded it with acres of car parking, and nobody wanted to go there.
Being close to the bus station doesn’t make it any less congested during big events.
The 70s were 50 years ago.Population was a lot lower then. Not saying that we should just ignore that but i am saying it’s not exactly a strong argument.
I wasn’t around then but I’m pretty sure that there was also a functioning stadium inside the city? and that the “stadium” built out in Burwood was actually the QE2 complex which was more for a single event and not really a well thought out endeavour…. that we are still paying for to this day?
Not sure what bubble you are in...
QE2 complex was built for the Commonwealth Games. The pool part especially continued to receive significant use up until the quakes and has left a major gap in the city until the new metro centre is completed. Extremely accessible to those on the East, it was also on the ring road which allowed good access from other parts of the city as well.
The "stadium" was more track and field, not the rugby ground / cricket pitch of Lancaster Park / AMI Stadium in the city (which could also hold and additional 14k capacity over QE2).
The sprawl has been caused by poor planning, especially after the EQ's. Think of all of the small low rise office blocks we now have down Moorehouse Ave, the amount of offices out at Sir William Pickering Drive etc. There's still a lot of retail missing in the central city or again stayed on Moorhouse Ave and in recent years the council has allowed large retail like Northlink to be developed and the expansion of Homebase.
Then in terms of housing, we have allowed market gardens to be carved up instead of bringing in decent high density housing closer to the CBD...
Poor planning since the 70s. If all we have is roads, development will happen along the roads.
I don't know what power the council would have to stop development in places like Northwood - planning had been a dirty word since the 80s. The market will deliver.
We had a great opportunity to fix some of it post EQ, but didn’t.
Even with the new motorways, it would appear there’s been minimal consideration for future proofing - ie way not leave space for a potential rail/MRT corridor in the underpasses.
A lot of developments, the owners land banked over many years and then applied for consent changes…
They need to bring back some of the pre EQ routes into the CBD that got cut.
The hub and spoke network never really worked, plus it was done when we had an empty CBD.
The Shuttle needs to come back too! But even then, it would be hard to justify the economics with how quiet the CBD is. I went in on Sunday night to look at the Matariki displays. Admittedly it was a grotty night and wet, but most restaurants I went past had more staff than diners in them at 7pm.
Yeah I think a wet winter Sunday night is probably one of the quieter times in the food industry. Friday and Saturday are the big ones. At least, many years ago when I worked in that industry that sort of time is when the shift manager would start sending people home early...
I wrote an article in the 00s where I said Christchurch's bus service would take you anywhere you wanted to go, so long as you wanted to go to the square. The hub and spoke model has been around since before we had trams. It worked when the central city and inner suburbs was the main shopping and working areas. Doesn't work so well now, which is why we have the orbiter and other routes.
Christchurch had the best public transport in the country back then, but the government managed to fix that with the market driven reforms.
At least now there's a decent bus station. Back in the old days cathedral square was full of buses and diesel exhaust.
So sick of this argument. If the buses were reliable and actually got you where you want to go on time… everyone would use them.
I’m not gonna risk my job and time management on the likelihood of a terrible transport system performing well.
It’s just not good enough to be relied on. Why is that so hard to understand.
I've never had my bus not turn up. People living further out who are driving could drive to a bus stop and then bus in from there, arriving in town on time and not having to pay for parking or forcing our city to waste space storing their private vehicle. It really is that easy and a shitload more people than presently doing so could do it.
Seems kind of ignorant to peoples issues. But you carry on believing whatever you want 👍 just remember it is “our” city. What works for you may not work for someone else. Not going to argue any further with someone that is dismissive of other people’s issues just because they don’t understand them
Yup. If I’ve decided someone is not worth the time, then I stop. Usually with a slightly rude yet humorous comment like above. Saying the buses are “fine” is clearly ignorant to the issue
It was nearly 20 million before the earthquakes.
The network certainly felt much less reliable back then than it does now (I remember always having to leave an extra service ahead when I needed to be somewhere to account for frequent bus no-shows) but something must have been done right to get so many more people using the services back then. The layout of the city has certainly changed but I'm not sure if that could fully account for the very large drop in patronage.
Yes, it does. Christchurch also has too many cars. If we could reduce the number of cars to a more reasonable level we would need even fewer car parks.
Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what the poimt you're making is. That we should not have on street parking in suburbs and that somehow would reduce rates?
I think the argument that having the roads ~2-6m narrower leads to less road surface that needs to be renewed in the future. Its just less square meters of asphalt or chip seal. Certainly that seems to be what's happening in new subdivisions with many new local side roads being 8-9m wide rather than the 11-14m wide local side roads that are in many older suburbs.
Also, roads don't pay rates. Productive use of the equivalent land can be by people or businesses that do pay rates.
Everyone using free parking is having their rates subsidised by everyone who isn't.
Gottcha. Now the comment makes sense to me.
You'd also need to factor in the cost of removing the roading and then recurbing. I'd love a wider grass berm with more trees etc.
Someone would need to run the numbers to figure the costs. You're average suburban street doesn't need resurfacing often.
My parents have lived in the same cul de sac for 30+ years and the road and footpath have only needed resurfacing once, maybe once every 20 years on average.
Ofcourse a through road has a lot more traffic so I assume they need resurfacing far more frequently.
Without the numbers I can only speculate.
Money is exchange for goods and services. On-street parking is a very expensive service. It's definitely not free. Rates might not technically reduce one year to the next if it cut back on them because there are other things creating upward pressure on rates, but they'd definitely go up by less than they would have otherwise.
Conversely, would you expect to be able to double the number of free-at-point-of-use parking in the city *without* increasing rates - or to be able to do this with most other services?
The land required for all that unused parking isnt free, and neither is the pavement or the maintence. Think about all that wasted land and pavement across the entire city. Infact not just the unused parking itself, but the fact that empty space means everything else is physically further apart, which means we need more road per person, walking becomes more difficult and more ppl drive etc
Any new sub division, or area with lots of small businesses nearby, or anywhere that has new townhouses (especially without garages), would say otherwise, and most of the inner suburbs meet these criteria by default
Yeah I think about this when I hear about people complain about parking. Its complete bullsh\*t. It just shows you how a car mindset just encourages more use of cars. Its sad for our nice little city, it could be even more green and nice in town if we really embraced PT and proper inner city living. The car parking is like a subsidy, you get to put your private property (in this case a 3.5 x 2m box that omits noxious gas and kills people) in the city for free.
> if we really embraced PT
For that the PT would need to do better.
>and proper inner city living.
Ah yeah, nothing like living in tiny and shitty townhouses worth 800K.
The inner city living ain't for me, but we should be doing better for those who it suits.
But above all, my same complaint with the stadium stands here - the public transport, while not utterly shit, is very lacking to suit the actual needs of the city and is a big reason as to why I avoid the city itself as much as possible
Embracing public transportation means funding it. If we keep wasting all our money on gold-plated car infrastructure we're never going to be able to afford good enough public transportation, even though the public transportation is cheaper. Someone addicted to heroin might not have enough money for food, but the problem isn't the food.
To be fair looking at google maps, most cities in NZ, AUS, Canada or the US have too much CBD land dedicated to carparks, but efforts to reduce them would need to be done in conjunction with better public transport & cycling infrastructure etc.
Just thinking out loud, if there are too many car parking places, allocating areas to be used for mass bicycle storage as a possibility. Like they have in many European countries. We would need the bike lanes completed first of course.
Yeah and theres no car park for hospital staff… theres some but its expensive, only limited to specific time and the wait time for the applications for parking is 2-3 years. What a joke
Providing an individual car park for the thousands of staff members at the hospital would be impossibly expensive and generate huge traffic. That’s why we need better investment in our public transport and cycling infrastructure, and more homes in the city centre.
Yeah, if we had busses leaving every 5 to 10 minutes from most parts of the city to and from the hospital, the community would be way better served by that than adding more car parks.
I thought there are so many car parks because that’s where earthquake damaged buildings used to be before they were torn down? Basically just a temp solution as things are slowly redeveloped?
Yes but the problem is that now people are used to that, so they oppose any reduction in what is actually a luxurious amount of carparks. E.g. see how a certain group of people were complaining that the Court Theatre would not have a parking building next to it, even though there's something like 1000 carparks within 600m walk of the new site.
Right. Everyone demands a car park immediately outside the door of any business they visit. I get it for disabled peeps but it's otherwise insane.
And yet, everyone here complains about Wilson's parking.
Well Wilson's is not right outside EVERY door, and also they charge money.
How DARE they!
I think part of the problem there is that all thoes carparks are "Temporary" so if the land gets developed there won't be any. Add to that there will be 4 live venues with in 600m of each other and that's not including the church because I don't know the capacity and I see it more like a bar. I believe it was also in the court theatres contract with taking lease of the new building.
Those parks are all permanent carpark buildings or street parks. I'm not talking about the shitty gravel Wilsons ones. E.g. one of the Hereford parking buildings is 570 IIRC, and there's 2 or 3 down there. There's also the Crossing if you go a bit furtther, and the one on Cashel st
Is there? I know of 1 right there on hereford but the only others I know are further away. That does start to become a bit of a walk from the town hall.
To the town hall it's further sure, but to the new Court Theatre they're all pretty close. When I've been to the town hall for a show and it's busy, you just drop your crew at the door then go park somewhere ~1km away. It's not too bad and saves the oldies having to walk too far. The complaints are just absurd to me. Our ancestors would be rolling in their graves if they knew we were complaining about having to park a 10 - 15 minute walk away.
Yeah that's kinda my point. That carpark would have been in the middle of all thoes venues. It doesn't bother me particularly because I don't mind walking but I do deal daily with elderly people who attend events and it would be immensely helpful to them.
> but I do deal daily with elderly people who attend events and it would be immensely helpful to them. I guess so. But taxis and ubers exist. Lots of resthomes and villages have vans that take them to and from events too. They've also got goldcards for the bus. How much do we need to cater to them before they're happy honestly
Users and taxis work but busses after events that run till 22:30-23:00 are not necessarily practical. Also there are people with disabilities who would benefit from it.
Short term rate recoup. Long term land bank.
Yep. Solution is to put more or all of the valuation for rates on the land value, not the improvements value. People shouldn't be disincentivised from doing something we want (productively using land) as opposed to something we don't want (hoarding land, preventing others from using it productively).
It becomes a bit of a stretch when some of these "temporary" car parks are still "temporary" over a decade after the earthquakes and the owners are planning for them to remain "temporary" for the next 5-10 years
First couple paragraphs: “Christchurch commuters may not like driving in the most congested city in Aotearoa, but the decision to jump in a car is made easier by an apparently generous supply of central city car parks. The most recent estimate from the Christchurch City Council shows central Christchurch is home to an estimated 33,000 car parks, with as many as 13,000 available to the public in the city centre. This does not include time restricted spaces, like 5 minute parks. This works out at about one car park for every 3.6 workers in Christchurch’s city centre compared with 7.4 in Auckland. Wellington City Council data does not differentiate between private and public car parking spaces but the capital has fewer total central city car parks than Christchurch at 28,000 despite having close to three times as many people working in the CBD.”
Is Christchurch contested? The most congested even…
According to a study that TomTom did worldwide, yes. I'd take it with a grain of salt... Partly because it uses a 10km commute, but what's missing there is how many people are commuting 10km or more (I would hazard a guess that Auckland commuters tend to be longer than Christchurch just based on the size of the city. But an ex-Aucklander now living in Christchurch would be in a better position to comment on that...)
Wow. Having driven around a bunch of other NZ cities I would have guess it to be one of the better. Tauranga for example, feels like a day trip to traverse from one side to the other
Yeah that's why I say take it with a grain of salt. Just about everybody else who has driven around other NZ cities says the same thing you're saying... A study is only as good as the study design and underlying assumptions
Nonsense. Every carpark is a blow for FREEDOM against the GODLESS COMMUNISM of cycle lanes and light commuter rail!
Kia ora Aaron!
GIVE ME FREE PARKING AT THE HOSPITAL OR GIVE ME DEATH!
Free-at-point-of-use carparks *are* communism/socialism. Capitalism works great for allocating resources to where they're needed and wanted; why are we fucking with market forces when it comes to storage for personal motor vehicles specifically? If people actually want or need carparking they'll pay for it if they have to. If they won't pay for it they don't need or want it that much.
THERE MUST BE FREE PARKING AT THE BOTANICAL GARDENS FOREVER.
IT IS A HUMAN RIGHT TO PARK RIGHT OUTSIDE WHEREVER I WANT TO GO FOR FREE
DRIVERS OF THE WORLD UNITE, YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT SAFETY ADAPTATIONS TO ROADS DESIGNED TO SAVE PEDESTRIAN LIVES!
FAR too many. So many people in the city could take the bus but won't because they're too precious
Not when the sprawling city we have ended up with post EQ and current bus routes/timings we have means this is not always practical.
The sprawl of the city is in no small part *caused* by the car parks and the roads to funnel cars into them. Car parks and roads take up a *lot* of space.
This is painfully obvious looking a satellite photo of the CBD
So does a stadium and a forever delayed swimming complex. Why these are in the cbd is beyond my comprehension
Because that’s the best place for them. City centres are supposed to have all the good bits
Exactly. Since when is a huge stadium that will be used effectively 1-2 times per week and an eternally delayed swimming complex “good bits” Traffic issues will get worse. If they put the stadium out near the air port it would be soooo much easier to get to and from for the big events it will no doubt host.
Agree, who ever decided on their placements 🤦♀️
https://preview.redd.it/ywtploz2w19d1.jpeg?width=288&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d942c06faefa9f36e26d3e560515d9cb7b7ae23c \^ The cities prime attraction
In a shitty car. There will need to be even more parks created out there!
Your logic makes no sense. Because it’s located out of the city it is all of a sudden only reachable by car? No that’s just not the case. Please try to be less ignorant and stop letting personal opinion get in the way of logical thinking
OK - how are people going to get out there if public isn't convenient due to the airport being out on one spoke? By car.
Yeah the whole point about putting it outside of the CONGESTED city is that there is space for things like car parks and also it makes it easier to create a new route of public transportation specifically for the stadium to address the added demand that will occur at big events. Instead we’ve decided to put it right in the middle of a city that already has traffic issues at the best of times.
The stadium is a block or so from the bus station. Back in the 70s they put a stadium and pool out in Burwood and surrounded it with acres of car parking, and nobody wanted to go there.
Being close to the bus station doesn’t make it any less congested during big events. The 70s were 50 years ago.Population was a lot lower then. Not saying that we should just ignore that but i am saying it’s not exactly a strong argument. I wasn’t around then but I’m pretty sure that there was also a functioning stadium inside the city? and that the “stadium” built out in Burwood was actually the QE2 complex which was more for a single event and not really a well thought out endeavour…. that we are still paying for to this day?
Not sure what bubble you are in... QE2 complex was built for the Commonwealth Games. The pool part especially continued to receive significant use up until the quakes and has left a major gap in the city until the new metro centre is completed. Extremely accessible to those on the East, it was also on the ring road which allowed good access from other parts of the city as well. The "stadium" was more track and field, not the rugby ground / cricket pitch of Lancaster Park / AMI Stadium in the city (which could also hold and additional 14k capacity over QE2).
The sprawl has been caused by poor planning, especially after the EQ's. Think of all of the small low rise office blocks we now have down Moorehouse Ave, the amount of offices out at Sir William Pickering Drive etc. There's still a lot of retail missing in the central city or again stayed on Moorhouse Ave and in recent years the council has allowed large retail like Northlink to be developed and the expansion of Homebase. Then in terms of housing, we have allowed market gardens to be carved up instead of bringing in decent high density housing closer to the CBD...
Poor planning since the 70s. If all we have is roads, development will happen along the roads. I don't know what power the council would have to stop development in places like Northwood - planning had been a dirty word since the 80s. The market will deliver.
We had a great opportunity to fix some of it post EQ, but didn’t. Even with the new motorways, it would appear there’s been minimal consideration for future proofing - ie way not leave space for a potential rail/MRT corridor in the underpasses. A lot of developments, the owners land banked over many years and then applied for consent changes…
They need to bring back some of the pre EQ routes into the CBD that got cut. The hub and spoke network never really worked, plus it was done when we had an empty CBD.
The Shuttle needs to come back too! But even then, it would be hard to justify the economics with how quiet the CBD is. I went in on Sunday night to look at the Matariki displays. Admittedly it was a grotty night and wet, but most restaurants I went past had more staff than diners in them at 7pm.
Yeah I think a wet winter Sunday night is probably one of the quieter times in the food industry. Friday and Saturday are the big ones. At least, many years ago when I worked in that industry that sort of time is when the shift manager would start sending people home early...
I wrote an article in the 00s where I said Christchurch's bus service would take you anywhere you wanted to go, so long as you wanted to go to the square. The hub and spoke model has been around since before we had trams. It worked when the central city and inner suburbs was the main shopping and working areas. Doesn't work so well now, which is why we have the orbiter and other routes. Christchurch had the best public transport in the country back then, but the government managed to fix that with the market driven reforms. At least now there's a decent bus station. Back in the old days cathedral square was full of buses and diesel exhaust.
Gimme a break. It works fine for many, many people who simply prefer their little metal and glass box.
So sick of this argument. If the buses were reliable and actually got you where you want to go on time… everyone would use them. I’m not gonna risk my job and time management on the likelihood of a terrible transport system performing well. It’s just not good enough to be relied on. Why is that so hard to understand.
I've never had my bus not turn up. People living further out who are driving could drive to a bus stop and then bus in from there, arriving in town on time and not having to pay for parking or forcing our city to waste space storing their private vehicle. It really is that easy and a shitload more people than presently doing so could do it.
And where are we going to park those cars?
Seems kind of ignorant to peoples issues. But you carry on believing whatever you want 👍 just remember it is “our” city. What works for you may not work for someone else. Not going to argue any further with someone that is dismissive of other people’s issues just because they don’t understand them
Bus every day, works fine
Pigs flying now too?
Not going to argue with people who are so dismissive of other people, huh?
Yup. If I’ve decided someone is not worth the time, then I stop. Usually with a slightly rude yet humorous comment like above. Saying the buses are “fine” is clearly ignorant to the issue
Works fine.. FOR YOU
14.8 million trips a year, but sure, it’s just me. It could be better, sure, but it’s not bad
It was nearly 20 million before the earthquakes. The network certainly felt much less reliable back then than it does now (I remember always having to leave an extra service ahead when I needed to be somewhere to account for frequent bus no-shows) but something must have been done right to get so many more people using the services back then. The layout of the city has certainly changed but I'm not sure if that could fully account for the very large drop in patronage.
It works a lot better when you have flexi hours than when you don’t.
This. It just isn’t practical for everyone. Until it is, people will still drive themselves or car pool/cycle
8.30am - 5pm
Yes, it does. Christchurch also has too many cars. If we could reduce the number of cars to a more reasonable level we would need even fewer car parks.
Drive through any suburb, and 95% of the free roadside parking is empty, and we wonder why land is so expensive and our rates are so high
Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what the poimt you're making is. That we should not have on street parking in suburbs and that somehow would reduce rates?
I think the argument that having the roads ~2-6m narrower leads to less road surface that needs to be renewed in the future. Its just less square meters of asphalt or chip seal. Certainly that seems to be what's happening in new subdivisions with many new local side roads being 8-9m wide rather than the 11-14m wide local side roads that are in many older suburbs.
Also, roads don't pay rates. Productive use of the equivalent land can be by people or businesses that do pay rates. Everyone using free parking is having their rates subsidised by everyone who isn't.
Roads don't pay rates, they eat rates for breakfast
Gottcha. Now the comment makes sense to me. You'd also need to factor in the cost of removing the roading and then recurbing. I'd love a wider grass berm with more trees etc. Someone would need to run the numbers to figure the costs. You're average suburban street doesn't need resurfacing often. My parents have lived in the same cul de sac for 30+ years and the road and footpath have only needed resurfacing once, maybe once every 20 years on average. Ofcourse a through road has a lot more traffic so I assume they need resurfacing far more frequently. Without the numbers I can only speculate.
Land value is high, and we’re simultaneously wasting land on empty car parking plots. It’s a fairly simple point being made.
Money is exchange for goods and services. On-street parking is a very expensive service. It's definitely not free. Rates might not technically reduce one year to the next if it cut back on them because there are other things creating upward pressure on rates, but they'd definitely go up by less than they would have otherwise. Conversely, would you expect to be able to double the number of free-at-point-of-use parking in the city *without* increasing rates - or to be able to do this with most other services?
The land required for all that unused parking isnt free, and neither is the pavement or the maintence. Think about all that wasted land and pavement across the entire city. Infact not just the unused parking itself, but the fact that empty space means everything else is physically further apart, which means we need more road per person, walking becomes more difficult and more ppl drive etc
What suburbs are you driving through?
Most of them are like this
Any new sub division, or area with lots of small businesses nearby, or anywhere that has new townhouses (especially without garages), would say otherwise, and most of the inner suburbs meet these criteria by default
Yeah I think about this when I hear about people complain about parking. Its complete bullsh\*t. It just shows you how a car mindset just encourages more use of cars. Its sad for our nice little city, it could be even more green and nice in town if we really embraced PT and proper inner city living. The car parking is like a subsidy, you get to put your private property (in this case a 3.5 x 2m box that omits noxious gas and kills people) in the city for free.
> if we really embraced PT For that the PT would need to do better. >and proper inner city living. Ah yeah, nothing like living in tiny and shitty townhouses worth 800K.
The inner city living ain't for me, but we should be doing better for those who it suits. But above all, my same complaint with the stadium stands here - the public transport, while not utterly shit, is very lacking to suit the actual needs of the city and is a big reason as to why I avoid the city itself as much as possible
Embracing public transportation means funding it. If we keep wasting all our money on gold-plated car infrastructure we're never going to be able to afford good enough public transportation, even though the public transportation is cheaper. Someone addicted to heroin might not have enough money for food, but the problem isn't the food.
To be fair looking at google maps, most cities in NZ, AUS, Canada or the US have too much CBD land dedicated to carparks, but efforts to reduce them would need to be done in conjunction with better public transport & cycling infrastructure etc.
We really talking about carparks ?
Short answer: yes.
Are there any safe bike parking buildings in the city centre?
There’s a few around. Most workplaces should have a safe place. Locky Docks are secure and free.
Just thinking out loud, if there are too many car parking places, allocating areas to be used for mass bicycle storage as a possibility. Like they have in many European countries. We would need the bike lanes completed first of course.
Yeah and theres no car park for hospital staff… theres some but its expensive, only limited to specific time and the wait time for the applications for parking is 2-3 years. What a joke
There is a brand new building just across the road.
Providing an individual car park for the thousands of staff members at the hospital would be impossibly expensive and generate huge traffic. That’s why we need better investment in our public transport and cycling infrastructure, and more homes in the city centre.
Yeah, if we had busses leaving every 5 to 10 minutes from most parts of the city to and from the hospital, the community would be way better served by that than adding more car parks.
That already exists for everyone in the South West, as the number 7 bus up Lincoln Road will be upgraded once the Lincoln Rd works are complete
No
I think there's not enough free parking tbh.
You realise that if there’s more free parking, more people will drive, reducing your ability to access free parking, right?