Pay Parking at Canberra Hospital

I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Why don’t people just park on the footpath with the bonnet up pretending to be broken down like I do?

Hmm – there could be a new form of volunteering at hospitals – little old ladies that collect whole day vouchers from anyone who is leaving and pass them on to new arrivals!

Indi, it really doesn’t make much difference. Corbell has said that the parking fees will go into the Hospital budget. What that means is that the total hospital budget will be reduced by the amount of revenue. Therefore, whether it goes to consolidated revenue directly or indirectly really makes no difference.

For those in the APS who do budgets, they will know that Section 35 receipts are taken into account when appropriated funds are distributed – the arrangements in the ACTPS will be exactly the same.

I don’t always agree with bonfire, but this time he’s dead right – the fines will be very high (as people will get caught up in situations where they have no opportunity to go out and feed the voucher machine), and this will almost certainly outweigh parking fees.

What that will lead to is that anyone turning up there will have to buy an all-day voucher, just in case, and that’s an unfair impost, largely resulting from the irregular and inefficient way that hospitals everywhere work.

Heres a dirty little secret teased out of the head of urban services at a belco communist council meeting.

if indi owns a property with a large carpark, he must introduce paid parking. indi can keep the parking revenue and the govt will keep the compliance revenue (fines).

to put this in context – in the first year after paid parking was introduced to belco, more fine revenue was collected than paid parking.

pardon ignorance – but would the $$ collected at the hospital go into consolidated revenue or to aid in funding the hospital?

If it’s consolidated revenue then it just doesn’t fly…

I went to the Hospital markets the other week. It seems that after pay parking is introduced all those free loaders who park and ride or walk to Woden will be replaced in spades by more people parking. That is becasue there seems to be a whole lot of temporary car parking places going up.

Sounds like all those stories about people abusing the carparking is Government bullshit. Someone in Woden should do an audit of carparking around Woden before and after the pay parking is introduced.

Why have pay parking anyway? When you factor the costs of collection and compliance, they wouldn’t be making much anyway. Easier to just add a few bucks to everyone’s rego and let us park for nothing, I say!

Thanks publius, that makes so much sense. It’s a bit like the Middle East, where “collective punishment” for the sins of a few is carried out by overwhelming force that has enormous collateral damage.

Garran residnets believe that the amount of parking by Woden workers is quite small – there is certainly some foot traffic, but it’s not to the point where draconian measures are justified.

And if these people did park in Woden, paid or otherwise, then there would be increased parking problems there.

It seems to many of us that this is a foolish policy, based on furphies, where other measures may have had a desired effect. To exacerbate the newly created problems, that didn’t exist before, they have chosen the worst possible implementation solution.

It stinks.

It is all getting very complicated, with some exemptions for some groups. Better to go back to first principles, viz there should be no paid parking at Canberra Hospital. The Stanhope Government needs to find ways to exclude/discourage commuters who work at Woden from parking there but not punish people visiting someone at the hospital.

A serious problem with paid parking at hospitals is that the public transport alternative is so abysmal.

If you recall the ‘sustainable transport plan’ which promised so much and delivered so little, recommends paid parking as a way to encourage peopel to use buses.

This simply doesnt add up.

All paid parking has doen is collect revenue for the gummint. There has been no significant increase in patronage of buses due to paid parking anywhere.

If Canberra had a genuine mass transit public transport alternative, such as light rail, then perhaps many people who might have driven would use public transport. As it is, with buses competing in the grind of traffic, stopping jerkily throwing old people around (ive seen it) they have no alternative except to drive.

Poor policy, poorly implemented delivering a poor result.