A few weeks ago we had an all day meeting on parking in the City.

When I told my friends the night before that I had to leave the pub early because of an important meeting the next day they were impressed. Until they asked what it was about. Cue much laughter.

But parking, and car use in general, is actually very important. It’s important to residents, who can never find a space outside their house or on their road. To the City Council, as a revenue stream. To businesses, as a convenience factor. To citizens, as a mobility issue.

Parking is an element of the transport matrix and so is very much related to ease of movement. How we get from place to place in a City, and the ease, economy and comfort with which we do so, is very much linked to ones standard of life.

Since my election many individual issues had raised their head, some specific, others more general and this meeting was the first (of many I hope) to look at the wider strategic issue. We looked at some short term solutions and longer term ones and below is an exploration of two of them:

Short term – parking on footpaths

Parking on footpaths: unlike some European cities, this is illegal in Ireland. You can’t put any part of your car on a footpath. This poses quite a problem as Dublin is a medieval city and many of its roads are too narrow to accommodate on street parking while also allowing a smooth flow of traffic. So, in a typical Irish solution, the Council allows it to happen on certain roads if no one is making too much of a fuss, turns a blind eye and tells the clampers to stay away. But, if the clampers get 3 complaints, they have no choice. And people who have been parking on the footpath without fear suddenly come home one day to find €80 worth of metal on their wheel. One Councillor is pushing for a change in the law so that lines can be drawn on footpaths to indicate that cars can park on them, but only within the designated spaces. I suppose the idea is to bring some order to chaos and take a practical approach. Not everyone supports this though, particularly the National Council of the Blind in Ireland. From here we’re going to get a consultant to review what is done in comparable European cities. I wonder how much that’s going to cost.

Long term – car clubs

The long term solution to parking problems in our residential areas is less car ownership. Which means more public transport usage, better public transport etc. But public transport often does not have the flexibility that one requires to their journey or doesn’t suit the purpose of the trip. Enter car clubs. I’ve been harping on about these for a few months now and you can read more about it in other blog posts. Very basically, it’s about bringing cars in to the public transport matrix, much like the Dublinbikes. There is interest and there is a pilot scheme operating down in Cork and at the moment I’m trying to find out what obstacles need to be negotiated here in Dublin and how. At our meeting we got to discuss this a bit and I learnt the following:

• It’s not currently possible under Irish law to have residential only parking on a street because our streets are public property. This same law prevents us from designating certain parking spaces as ‘car club only’ because that’s viewed as private use. I suppose this is the same reason that the electric car juice points around town do not have ‘electric car parking only’ designations;
• Private streets do still exist down in the Docklands so something may be possible there;
• In Cork, the scheme is (mostly) operating on Council owned land;
• Could we use DCC owned land here? There are 300 spaces in the Wood Quay car park, with two and a half thousand staff working there. 75% of staff in the Council travel by public transport so they’re doing pretty good as it is and there may not be capacity to reduce the number of available spaces further (I disagree);
• What about another DCC site like Drury Street car park? According to operators of car clubs, for them to work they need to be visible, on the street, and you need 24hour access;
• The Council has written to the Minister for Transport requesting that the legislation be amended to allow car club cars to park on public streets.