'First 15 minutes free' city parking plea
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FREE parking in Inverness’s old town is vital if fed-up motorists are to be coaxed back to struggling city centre shops, it has been claimed.
Mike Smith, the manager of Inverness Business Improvement District (BID), believes the success of short-term parking trials in Perth should be copied in the Highlands.
He says delighted businesses in the fair city have been boosted by the introduction of free parking for up to 15 minutes in on-street and council-owned car parks.
And he has urged the authorities in Inverness to explore similar options, arguing that parking controls "need to be viewed as part of the trading area’s marketing offer rather than as a traffic control measure".
He added: "Everyone says they want to see a successful city centre, but what is most important in that respect, beyond physical changes and more attractions, is footfall.
"You need people to be coming into the city centre regularly and often, and one way you do that is by making it easier for them to do so by car – the preferred option of the vast majority of people going shopping in the Highlands.
"We need to be cleverer about how we use the space we have.
"For example, I came into town the other Saturday and there are a whole load of loading bays that aren’t being used a lot of the time.
"Can we make them available for parking on certain days, or certain times of the day? Or can we have more spaces that are shared for a variety of uses generally?"
He said that the introduction of the new decriminalised parking regime had brought the city centre back to "some semblance of parking normality" and it was now time to build on that.
Citing the successful review carried out in Perth last year, he said: "All the feedback I’ve had from businesses and council officers I’ve spoken to has been very positive about what this has achieved."
An administrator of the Inverness Parking Facebook page agreed that this proposal was worth looking at in more detail.
"Every change to the city traffic flow seems geared towards forcing cars off the streets and into underground car parks and shopping malls," he said.
"On a cold day or days with bad weather, once people are inside these places they rarely come out again and their shopping is contained.
"All around Church Street, Union Street and Queensgate, if people buy items that are anywhere near large then they have to negotiate these items back to their vehicles.
"The inability to do this puts many people off and again the city centre loses out as people either go online or out to the retail parks."
However, Pat Hayden, chairman of Crown and City Centre Community Council, argued the current parking regime needs more time to bed in before another review.
She said: "We’re just seeing how the new regime with the parking attendants out and about is working and we need to leave some time for that to settle in before we start looking to make any further changes."
She said she never had any problems finding a space in either the Eastgate or Rose Street car parks and added: "Even if you were thinking of more on-street parking I don’t know where you’d put it without obstructing buses and the like, plus the city centre is not exactly that big anyway.
"Using any of the existing car parks you’re still within easy walking distance of the shops.
