The Second "City by the Bay" award nominee for incredibly stupid parking ideas goes to the city of Launceston in Tasmania — Read it here and weep.
The local city dads came up with an idea to charge nothing for the first hour parking downtown but then charge after that. Heh. It took about ten nanoseconds for the smart Aussie shoppers to figure out that if you shopped for 59 minutes and then went out and drove to the next place you wanted to visit, you didn’t have to pay for parking at all. Duh…
Naturally the local government got it backwards. If you are going to give something away, give away the third or fourth hour if your goal is to keep people downtown and spending money. The plan so far has cost the local parking operation $100,000 in three months.
I need an Advil
JVH
For those who don’t know, the award was named for that City by the Bay, immortalized by Tony Bennett so many years ago for their own incredible parking rules — lowering on street pricing and raising off street pricing, and then wondering why everyone wanted to park on street and the off street garages weren’t filling up first…
