DCC targeting Town Belt parking

I too, have chafed with impatience at the tour buses when trying to get a half-decent shot of the Railway Station, but Cr Butcher should not fool herself - they bring substantial income into the city and use the Railway Sation as a convenient dropping-off/picking-up point. What we should be much more concerned about is the user-unfriendliness Dunedin has developed toward those who must necessarily commute to their workplaces. A family member was, until recently, one of those affected, and she used to tell of fellow workers who were forced to arrive at their place of employment at least an hour before starting-time, just to obtain a parking space where they could leave their vehicles for protracted periods. However, it is nice for Cr Butcher to show her hand in advance of the local body elections. The councillors we need least, the 'political chameleons', will not do that. They'll obfuscate, fudge their answers, or be 'not available for comment' in the way they did which landed us with a stadium.

I've been to Copenhagen. It is flat and very bicycle friendly. Bicycles seem to be the transport norm there. It also has a first class mass transit system. Unlike Dunedin on both accounts. Fliss, how do you yourself get to get to town? Do you have a car? If so, where do you park? Do you need to park in Dunedin all day, 5 days a week, for your job?
The rest of us imagine that DCC management and counsellors must be divorced from reality because they do not experience the same everyday hassles in finding parking: do you have dedicated parks for yourselves? One of the attractions of Dunedin used to be that it was so easy to find parking. By trying to keep up with the big boys like Auckland and Sydney, the DCC has killed one of the plusses of living in a small and formerly welcoming city like Dunedin.

I take it you cycle everywhere Fliss? No 'machine' in your garage? When Dunedin gets a decent public transport system, I'll leave my 'machine' at home. Although I usually call it a car, most of us have got past the frightening realisation that the motorised steel contraption won't quite be ruination of life as we know it. Please try and find an equivalent topographical area to make your comparisons. Copenhagen is flat, has a Metro, trains, buses and free bikes for city travel. Dunedin has?

Have them towed: all. Clean Queens Drive up. Simple. No exceptions. Impound their cars until the owners pay the 'get back, and release' fine : Yes.

There are one or two tiny differences between Copenhagen and Dunedin.
In Copenhagen, as in all old cities built before trains, trams and buses were common people chose to live close together so as not have too long a walk to work, schools and shops. Then when the railways came, new housing developed close to those straight routes so people could walk to the railway station.
But most of Dunedin grew subsequent to the private motor car becoming common. The small dots of early settlement like Upper Junction with their own school merged into the larger whole and lost the facilities that made it possible for people to work, go to school and do their day to day shopping within walking distance of home. Dunedin cannot be adequately served by public transport, not without quadrupling its population without any increase in area.
Another thing, hills rule out easy public transport routes inter-connecting the area in a grid pattern without double-backs and duplication on some roads.
How hilly is Copenhagen?

You expect a lot, Fliss Butcher, if you think that you can promote these type of ideas, and not hear any criticism. I share your interest in Greeny-Leftist politics, and that makes you an ideal target to help me make fun of your loopy ideology. The ODT-Online is a good place to debate these things and we both know the value of a public debate, and why a personal discussion would be less fruitful.
I want Dunedin to be a better place, but worm-farms and woolly tree-warmers won't help our renters and ratepayers pay for your Dunedin Centre upgrade, or fix our messed up CBD parking. Show us that litter isn't your only concern by answering my questions in the comment below (Please Pledge Common Sense).

For anyone who mistakeningly believes car-free areas in a city will not work, I suggest they check out what has been happening in Copenhagen, Demark over the past ten years. Fantastic results with much better urban spaces for people - not machines. Starting with a reserve outside the Railway Station would be a vehicle-free priorty for me - especially those big buses that block the view down Stuart St from the Octagon.

It's pretty obvious if you walk along Queen's Drive behind OBHS - people drive there with their takeaways, park and eat and chuck the garbage out the window. If they were driving when they were doing it, the litter would be scattered far and wide rather than being in piles.

This person who uses a pseuedym has been bagging me for a while on this ODT online medium....sigh..never had the guts to call me or ask to meet me in person.
I am very happy to stand by my comments on litter. It is a big issue for me. It is a big issue for people of this city. Anything we can all do to solve it is better then just whinging about it.
Go on "Jimmy' sign up and be a leader.

In my experience getting a path really clean seems to encourage people to stop littering, after a while it seems to maintain itself. People seem to really want to keep their environment clean if it already is.

I think that the really worry the DCC has with putting litter bins in the town belt is that people might actually use them - and then they'll have to empty them. If the problem is vandalism, then spend the money and build ones that last, I don't think there's any excuse for not providing litter bins where there's litter.

[Abridged]

The DCC continues its crusade to drive the motorist out of the city, a city that without the car would not survive in its present form. Any motorist who votes for these incumbents that call themselves councillors needs their heads testing - ooops sorry that wont be an option soon. Until Dunedin has a viable and affordable transport option the car needs to be catered for. It is not the enemy of the city but its life blood at the moment.

Fliss, I don't see how you link litter with car parking. If you observed an actual piece of litter on Queens Drive, how did you decide that it came from a parked car?

I don't see any harm in pushing non-littering, except that litter could hardly be Dunedin's biggest problem. Is this your prime mission: to save our planet from the litter threat? What happened to your concern about diverting water renewal money into the FB Stadium, and what about the secrecy of the huge forecast operating losses of the stadium? And then there is the DCC debt mountain, and the hideous levels of rates increases in the next few years.

On the topic of parking, why have you done nothing to fix the mess that you helped to create? What will you say to all the students, workers, shoppers and shop-owners who have had their lives disrupted by your council's hare-brained parking system?
Do you not care about these things? Do you only care about litter and woolly tree-warmers and public nut trees? [Abridged]

Vigilance is correct about the DCC's crusade against car parks and car users. The implementation of its Parking Strategy called for a net reduction of about 431 parks in the zoned CBD area, and that included removing 100% of free parking and 85% of time-limited (P120, P60 etc) parks. Because all the free parking was removed and because of the unaffordable increase in the DCC parking tax, they intended - and expected - the outer part of the zone to be only 20% occupied (See here- page 4).
Because our councillors mostly don't know what they are doing, their parking decisions have cause various problems. Because they also don't listen, these problems are still here. One of these problems is that commuters needing all-day parks have been forced out of the CBD parking zone into the Polytech/Uni area and also into residential areas. After deliberately pushing cars out of the CBD, our councillors appear baffled as to what is causing these problems. Syd Brown and his parking committee, and the sub-committees, have been trying for two years to understand the mess that they have created; but no breakthrough yet. As well as not understanding and not listening, our council also doesn't learn, so it is about to inflict its parking madness on other areas, including the South Dunedin shopping area.
Although there is no actual problem on Queens Drive, our council will no doubt feel compelled to fix it by removing some more car parks. I am pleased to see that one councillor (Richard Walls) offered a common sense viewpoint at yesterday's meeting.

The council would love to put more bins into our parks and reserves. Unfortunately, the more we put in, the more they get vandalised or stolen, so the current thinking to try stop wasting ratepayer funds on things that will be trashed is to do less and hope people will not litter. But alas, not everyone is so vigilant. My Leaders Litter Pledge was one solution to try model non-littering. I don't see it as a waste of my time and neither do the others Leaders who have signed up.

You are so right Kiwi Pom, and I would go further in suggesting that it is individuals employed by the two biggest wealth-generating businesses (the university and the hospital) that are parking in the Town Belt. But then, this council are experts at thumbing their noses at the very large group of ratepayers this city couldn't survive without.

This "pledge" sounds like a lot of rubbish to me.
How about just placing rubbish bins in our town scenic areas instead? Every park in every real city in the world has rubbish bins.
Is the DCC concerned that people will dump their domestic rubbish in such bins? And I suppose the cause of that is people on a budget have to pay to buy the official DCC trash bags or pay exorbitant amounts take their rubbish to the dump. Each move that this council makes just seems to cause another problem .... But why not just put some rubbish bins in the parks and see how it goes? It is not uncool to put rubbish bins in parks. [Abridged]

I do not believe that that there is an "ever increasing demand for parking". Instead, what has happened is that the DCC has been gradually reducing the available parking, and has begun charging for spaces that used to be free, and this has created new parking pressures. In the past 10 years I have seen a proliferation of useless yellow lines prohibiting parking in areas that used to be parkable. Around the University area, trees have been planted in what used to be parking spaces. Ridiculous. Go to New York City or Paris, and you'll see the trees planted on the sidewalk, not on parking places! I come originally from Manhattan, and I can honestly say that it is easier to find a free park there than here. Thank goodness South Dunedin is eminently parkable -- long may that be, but now the DCC has its greedy sights on it. I now do most of my shopping there.
If there was a decent mass transit system here, parking wouldn't be an issue. But the population base is too small; there are hills all around the centre of town which makes biking or walking not an option for many; and the bus system is relatively expensive and unreliable.

I don't work in town, but even I can see this council is hell bent on Dunedinites using paid parking. As for litter and tyre marks everywhere....Welcome to Dunedin. I'm certain visitors to this city assume we have no council based street cleaning service (probably funding for it was cut to pay for new parking meters)

For those of us that bag the Parking Wardens we need to realise they again will bear the brunt of carrying out our elected representatives' decisions.
That said I am in favour of protecting the Town Belt and agree something has to be done to preserve it. However with the ever increasing demand for parking I believe the Council needs to come up with an alternative for those commuters.
Generally speaking I would think most of thoses using those parks are working in the CBD and helping to generate Dunedin's wealth.

If you are upset and disgusted about the amount of litter in town belt and other areas of the city can I encourage you to sign up for my DCC's Leaders Litter Pledge on DCC website and show the public that it is not un-cool to pick up litter, not shameful, not a dumb idea but is in fact modelling the sort of behaviour we expect to see in our commmunity. http://www.dunedin.govt.nz/news/november-2009/city-leaders-pledge-to-pick-up-litter