The Controversy Of Free Parking In Victoria

On-street parking in downtown cost $3.00 to $1.50 hourly depending on the parking area, with 90 minutes to 24 hours of maximum stay, and free parking during the evenings, Sundays and Holidays (figure 2). To pay for the parking, Victoria has an online payment app called ParkVictoria App or using on-street pay stations with coin, credit card or parking card. According to Ismo Husu (2014), Victoria is committed to improve parking through considerations, such as: convenience, cost and availability. Certainly, the current features of on-street parking do provide the convenience in paying and the cost is affordable; however, the availability seems to be the issue. Despite the attempts to create a better driving experience, online articles by Ty Hooper

In the morning, many restaurants’ and bakery are open around 6 am. Such is seen with the Dutch Bakery opening at 7:30 am, with customers wanting to pick up their goods during the morning peak hours (Wong, 2016). With free parking, it becomes a contest of first come first serve; even though, some of these customers are seeking a spot for a few minutes. An article by Paul Mackie (2017) stated that free parking is expensive and suggests the inefficiency in maintaining a scarce resource. In New York, on-street parking isn’t regulated to residents; hence, people could drive up to the neighbourhood and park for a very long time at no charge. Similarly to Victoria, a timed frame free parking could cause issues like New York. Moreover, parkades in Victoria are free from 6 pm – 8 am. The overlap in free parking for morning peak hours has caused inconvenience to potential customers and

As suggested above, free parking will only encourage more driving; as a result, there are traffic congestions and parking congestions causing a spillover effect on businesses, customers and drivers. A suggestion would be to remove the free parking offered at parkades forcing people to pay for driving their vehicles. The prices for parking an hour in the parkade should be the same for parking on-street, but continue the $1 per 20 minute for on-street or even allow a minute pay system. Minute pay system is easily implementable because Victoria is using credit cards and online paying apps for on-street parking. This should encourage vehicle turnover allowing a better visitor flow for businesses. In 2003, Paris’s on-street parking is generally a paid service; thus, there has been a 13% decrease in driving activity (ITDP, 2014). The revenue generated from the parking could be reinvested in improving and maintaining the existing on-street parking. Likewise, it could be used to develop an online off-street and on-street parking app, similar to the parking counter in Bastion parkade. If drivers were able to check parking availability online, they could avoid driving aimlessly to find a parking space. Since Victoria has developed an online on-street paying app that could recognize the parking numbers, the infrastructure could exist to develop this, but lacks the