Have your say on Wellington’s proposed Parking Policy: the TL;DR edition
There’s a proposed new gospel for dealing with parking. It’s open for feedback til Monday 8th and it’s important because parking is so influential. No time? No problem!
This consultation is pretty geeky: there’s the proposal [452KB PDF], Q&A, some engagement quizzes. To have a say, they want you to fill in a multi-question survey.
We’ll provide some pointers soon to help if you want to do the full banana. But if you’re time-poor, there’s good news…
It’s legit to do a submission as an email. Yay!
If you only have 5 minutes, the below are our big take-home points. There’s the overall one (1) and then just 5: literally a handful!
In three easy steps:
- Copy the below, paste into an email, tweak for your taste,
- Put PARKING POLICY SUBMISSION in the subject line
- send to Council’s Senior Policy Advisor Helen Bolton by 5pm Monday 8th June.
Guaranteed sub-5 min – go you good thing!
1st and foremost: It’s definitely heading in the right direction. Thumbs up, good start.
In one word, we can generally SUPPORT this new parking policy.
Not “strongly support”, but not “neutral” and definitely not “oppose”. It’s a generally good foundation.
2. Implementation is everything.
Implementation will be where council shows this policy is worth anything more than the paper it’s written on.
It’ll be really hard, often expensive, and we want to see resolution and fortitude from council ’cause this is important. We’ll back you.
3. Embrace all the ways to change our behaviour.
Give us carrots as well as sticks. Reframe the discourse and the tools away from “rights” to drive and park. Reward and privilege travelling sustainably. Buffer any effect that’d deepen inequality.
4. Don’t force people to provide parking
No city should have minimum parking requirements if the rest of its landuse and transport system is roughly right, so phase these out ASAP. They suppress natural ingenuity and efficiency and skew the market badly.
5. Embrace and enable the better kinds of parking, de-prioritise the rest.
e-carshare, micromobility, bike parking, sustainable delivery and logistics vehicles and so on should be privileged and prioritised more.
Because they are helping us transition away from the old unsustainable model of living and moving people and stuff.
6. Couple parking much more firmly to landuse.
Outcome-based, landuse-based concepts like 20-minute neighbourhoods, active school zones, healthy streets, and social catchments are invisible.
Yet they should be powering this policy, and enabling developers’, landowners’, designers’ and businesses’ ingenuity to deliver them.
And that’s it! Go you good thing!
- Copy, paste into an email, tweak for your taste,
- Put PARKING POLICY SUBMISSION in the subject line
- send to Council’s Senior Policy Advisor Helen Bolton right now!
For bonus typing-cat points: share this with others so they too can pop in a submission by 5pm Monday 8th June!
For later at your leisure… check out this excellent webinar all about how cities should do parking, featuring transport expert Stuart Donovan post and slides here.
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