WCC Parking

Dave Burgess at the Dom Post reports:

Shops, bars and restaurants have joined in criticising Wellington City Council plans to charge for two hours of extra parking in the evenings and to increase fees to $5 an hour.

The increase would make Wellington’s parking the most expensive in New Zealand and dearer than Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane.

The Council is just being greedy. The increase to $5/hr is bad enough, but they also are going to make you pay up to 8 pm, instead of 6 pm.

The association also criticised the two-hour extension of the time the council can impose parking fees. “To me it looks like a money grab … I don’t accept the argument that by having higher parking fees you turn over the parks more quickly. I think by having higher parking fees you run the risk of having all the parks empty,” Mr Albertson said.

After 6 pm, there are generally lots of parks, so it is a nonsense to say they need to extend the fee to turn parks over more quickly.

If somone stood for Mayor in 2013 on a platform of reducing parking fees, I reckon they could do very well.