Page 3370 - Week 11 - Thursday, 11 November 2021
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but also encouraged click and collect visits to our retail stores and provided an option for essential workers to commute safely to work during a time when we were encouraging people to use public transport only where it was absolutely essential.
We also helped Canberrans perform contactless collection of their groceries by allowing supermarkets to use a small number of car parks in our public car parks for their direct-to-boot services.
Going to the substance of Ms Castley’s motion, encouraging and supporting Canberrans to shop, eat and socialise at our great local venues and retail precincts will be an important part of our next cautious steps out of lockdown from tomorrow night. But when it comes to the proposed actions in her motion, Ms Castley is misinformed or simply has not bothered to examine the widely available public information about car parking in our city.
If she had done, she would have found that the vast majority of car parks in the CBD and our town centres already have free parking after 5.30 pm, all day Saturday and all day Sunday. We provide this free car parking because car parks are generally in lower demand at this time when it is outside usual business hours and commuters are not parking in them while they go to work.
Providing free parking at this time instead encourages visitation to the hospitality and recreational venues in these areas. Not only is this parking free at this time, it is unlimited. So Canberrans can stay in our town centres for as long as they like, enjoying the great food, beverage and entertainment experiences on offer and pouring much-needed revenue into our local economy.
That said, there are several very popular areas in places like the city, Braddon, Dickson and Kingston, where paid parking actually helps support local businesses. In peak times, like Friday evening and Saturday morning, car parks in these particularly busy areas are highly in demand. Anyone who has ever driven down Lonsdale Street after work on a Friday can verify this. It is important that we encourage turnover in these highly valuable spaces so that people can run in and pick-up their takeaway, visit the local shops or park nearby if they have reduced mobility.
Another thing that the Canberra Liberals clearly have not considered is that paid parking in some selected areas of the CBD actually supports our thriving arts scene, as well as business. It is an effective way to manage demand within the ACT government car parks near the Canberra Theatre precinct, which is seeing more productions get underway.
Prior to the introduction of pay parking there, people were parking in those car parks to avoid paying in privately operated car parks like the Canberra Centre multistorey car parks. Pay parking has helped to deter this behaviour and ensured that patrons catching a show at the Canberra Theatre, The Playhouse or The Studio are reliably able to get a park. That is why the Canberra Theatre Centre has been very supportive of the current parking regime since it was put in place. Removing this would be a blow to the arts community during a time when they are focused on recovering from the impact of the pandemic.
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