The Dunedin City Council recently extended a $1-an-hour charging zone two blocks north along State Highway 1, up to the south side of Dundas St.
On Tuesday, the council also voted to put out to public consultation potential parking changes which would result in 185 free parking spaces in parts of Clyde St, Union St East, Harbour Tce, Forth St and Albany St being changed to metered parking.
Under the proposal, seven spaces in Union St, near Clyde St, would be changed to resident-only parking.
Otago University Students Association president James Heath said it was "always worrying" to hear of an increase in costs for students, particularly for something like parking outside their own homes.
"OUSA is against these parking changes on this basis and are interested in hearing more about how these changes won't negatively affect students.
"The DCC should also look at not just taking away opportunity but providing replacement - such as working alongside the ORC to provide cheaper, more functional and more sustainable public transport for students."
Public consultation on the idea is open until 5pm on May 21.
Union St East resident Oliver Ferrier, also a student at the university, said he "definitely " did not think it should be happening, and it was hard enough to find parks as it was.
"It's a student quarter. It shouldn't have [paid] parking at all. It's unnecessary."
The area surrounding the university should be kept free of parking meters, he said.
Another Union St East resident, who did not want to be named, said most of the second- and third-year students she knew had cars - and many students living in other parts of Dunedin chose to park their vehicles in her area in the morning, because it was free.
Residents' parking permits are available from the council in some circumstances, but they cost the resident $200 a year.
A Dundas St student said the parking area around his home was popular not just with students but with people who were working, and could not find parks elsewhere in the city.
"A lot of the cars around here aren't even students' cars," he said.
Many Dunedin students had cars, and he thought the changes were "ridiculous".
As part of the proposal, the council is suggesting 68 free 60- and 90-minute spaces in Vogel, Bond and Crawford Sts, between Jetty and Police Sts, would also become metered.
Comment has been sought from the University of Otago and Otago Polytechnic.
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Comments
Lose parks for unused cycleways then get the cash by transferring the parks you happily have up for no one
The DCC needs to replace income lost from the hundreds of carparks sacrificed for under-utilised cycle lanes. ECON 101. The DCC wants you to use an inefficient and a loss making bus service, and will allow traffic to get increasingly worse to 'make the move to buses' less painful. Vote them out!
Poor students. I don't think so- not by they way they spend money on booze and destruction. Save our sympathy for those that can't walk, bus or scoot.
Now that there are nearly as many cars in NZ as there are people, students, indeed we all, need to learn that the cost of running a car includes the price of parking it in the public sphere. Cars spend 90% of their working lives parked rather than being driven, so $200 p.a. for a resident parking spot is astonishingly cheap in such a sought-after area of town.
If instead of devoting a 6 metre strip of every highway to parking, we used that land to build housing how much cheaper would our infrastructure be! How much more efficient would be every public service. Such a sensible use of land won't come about in my lifetime but this is the opportunity cost of devoting the public sphere to stationery vehicles.
Got to pay for the cycle lanes and loss of parking somehow.......thanks council.