For a growing city that is finding it difficult to shake off the habits of a country town, wanting to park right outside its preferred destination (and for little or no cost), nothing could have been more welcome than the Premier’s surprise promise this week to weigh into a traditionally council area of control and dangle 1000 extra free carparks before the voting public.
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On Friday the opposition leader has sought to go one better by promising 1500 free carparks.
What this will mean for the council’s own difficult parking plan, that sought to build a reevaluation of the perceived value of CBD space, is anybody’s guess but basic market principles show people will not pay for what they can get for free elsewhere.
Nor is council likely turn its back on $14 or $20 million dollar boost that can take the heat of its immediate problem.
But if this is good politics, is it good policy?
The worst of Australian politics is the failure of leadership that simply defers the tough problems with a populist bidding race, too often known as kicking the can further down the road.
The lesson doesn’t change; some one, some day will have to pick it up.
If next Saturday’s winner were to hypothetically build a new multistory carpark on the abandoned glass house or at the hospital precinct; all for free, you won’t hear many complaints from the many staff in that area or from the GocHub.
But it begs the bigger question, what happens when these too are all full?
The bigger issue for Ballarat is what is good for a city of 120,000 may not be such a workable solution for 150,000 or even 200,000.
These large numbers are what trajectories point towards and it shows feeding the parking beast in these growth scenarios without behavioural change is a worsening addiction not a cure.
By numbers alone it is also a sure-fire recipe for future congestion, car dependency and even urban sprawl.
The failure of Ballarat’s past and present is that there are no attractive or even viable alternatives to change habits, certainly not before the imperatives of cost or convenience reach that tipping point.
The deficiencies of the internal public transport system are well known. Empty buses are not an indictment that buses are no good per se but that they lack sufficient convenience, frequency and speed to be any kind of an alternative to jumping in the car.
If driverless buses, as demonstrated by the Committee of Ballarat this week, seem like fanciful science fiction now, who knows what gap they could fill in ten years time when growing pressures make viable alternatives more valuable than ever.
The principle of these vehicles is that the cost saving of a driver makes more services possible and that given enough of these services, short trips or park-and-ride options cross that line in commuters minds from ‘nice idea’ to preferred choice.
But this is only one of many ideas and options which deserve investigation and discussion because they ask us to question what is possible instead of being succoured with what we have always done. The long term answer then would seem to require a more innovative and even visionary approach than those offered by political promises this week and part of this, even incrementally, is to seek behaviour change.
In the long term, a vibrant city heart is all about people, not cars. Investigating alternatives to get these people there and move them about in efficient, comfortable and cost-effective ways, offers more attractive prospects than vast parking lots. A future Ballarat deserves that much.
