Rudman's city: Carparking sting tells you to stay away from the city

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Nothing gets the venom flowing like a rise in carparking charges.

Last Wednesday night when I arrived at the ticket machine at the Civic carpark clutching my $5, I discovered to my ire that it now wanted $7.

My thoughts turned to the empty carpark I had passed on my way in - the free and exclusive one available for the city councillors who engineer these price rises for the rest of us.

But at least I didn't suffer the fate of Browns Bay concertgoer Russell Walls the Saturday before.

Having found the Civic park full, he had been forced into the clutches of the city-run Victoria St park. Two hours and 7 minutes later, he got stung for $10.

He and the family had saved for six weeks to go to the Spanish horses show at the Aotea Centre, he tells me, and found that being "flogged to death" for parking put a dampener on the evening.

Most of the city council carparks apparently ramped their prices up in time for the last Christmas rush.

The Civic park has now matched them, charging $3 up to an hour, $7 for two hours and $3 an hour above this. At nights, the Civic has a maximum fee of $7.

The increased take across the city is calculated at between $1 million and $1.5 million.

Out on the streets it's the same story. Last Thursday, a joint meeting of the transport and roading and the investment committees upped inner-city, on-street parking fees by 50 per cent to $3 an hour.

The take for the city coffers from the meters will be another $27,894 a month or $334,730 a year, though Catherine Harland, chairwoman of the transport and roading committee, is quick to claim it's not a revenue-gathering exercise.

In the case of the street parking she says, it's a matter of regulating supply and demand. For the buildings, it's about meeting budgets.

Whether manipulating pricing is effective in regulating parking habits is hard to say. A report from Philip Steven, the council's consultant project manager on parking tariffs, illustrates how difficult such social engineering is.

He starts off by claiming that research had shown parking behaviour was "strongly influenced" by, among other things, "relative pricing of options."

But it doesn't seem to have had any effect on Auckland parkers. In his report he summarises the results of introducing a $2-an-hour tariff citywide in October 1999. This resulted in increases of between 33 per cent and 100 per cent.

Revenue went up 12 per cent BUT with no significant change in occupancy and no change in parker behaviour.

Parkers did rebel initially, with "compliance levels" dropping 25 per cent, but eventually we buckled and paid up.

Mr Steven puts the refusal of parkers to respond to manipulation by price rises down to "low awareness of parking tariffs and the true relative prices of the various options available."

It's as though he thinks we sit around calculating such things when curtain up is in 15 minutes.

His solution is that "customer perceptions must be modified in order to make city parking policy effective."

For Alex Swney, lobbyist for inner-city businesses, alerting drivers to how expensive CBD parking is compared with free parking in malls and outer suburban shopping centres, as Mr Steven suggests, is just what he is scared off.

The members of his Heart of the City organisation pay 32 per cent of the city rates and he doesn't want customers deterred by the cost of parking.

Mr Swney claims to have University of Auckland research that shows the cost and availability of parking "are the greatest deterrents to visiting the CBD."

He throws the city bible, the central area plan, back in the politicians' faces. He quotes: "By controlling the supply, price and use of carparks in the central area AND simultaneously improving public transport, the rise and the level of congestion will be slowed."

As Mr Swney says, the public transport side of the equation is but a dream. Until it becomes reality, he wants carpark fees reduced to below the on-street charges.

He also wants free weekend parking. Who am I, an itinerant parker, to disagree?