At Tuesday night’s council meeting the two most contentious applications (Belsize Avenue & Hamilton Street) got their permits – both voted in unanimously. Hyams and Esakoff moved and seconded motions for increased setbacks and full visitor parking spots. The requirement for Construction Management Plans was also ‘tightened’ in the face of much community backlash recently. The thrust of councillor arguments was that applications should be ‘compliant’ with ResCode – especially visitor car parking.
Ostensibly these resolutions sound reasonable and justified. However, when we look at the bigger picture, we can only wonder what on earth is going on. All of council’s published documents on traffic and parking reveal that what is likely to happen is a REDUCTION IN CAR PARKING REQUIREMENTS in our activity centres. We repeat the relevant page from the recently published Integrated Transport Strategy. Please note these ‘recommendations’:
- explore a reduction in the statutory parking requirements for office use.
- Where it is demonstrated a public parking availability is underutilised during the evenings, explore a reduction in the statutory parking requirements for these commercial uses.
- allowing these commercial parking spaces to be shared by multiple users.
The writing’s on the wall! Council’s ‘parking’ strategy will include a REDUCTION in the current requirements. We will get parking overlays that will see waiver after waiver of both visitor and resident car parking or making the requirements for single, double, or triple bedroom places so minimal, that they amount to multiple waivers.
The relevance of councillors’ arguments on the Belsize Avenue and Hamilton Street applications become significant in the light of the above draft proposals. Both streets form part of the Carnegie and Bentleigh Activity Centre. Both are zoned Residential Growth Zone. Council’s consistent argument has been that shops can’t accommodate the necessary parking requirements, but neighbouring streets can. That means streets such as Hamilton and Belsize Avenue. So, if the eventual parking overlays adopt this approach and reduce the current regulations for offices, shops, and apartments, then these side streets will be chocka block full of parked cars.
Going a step further, we then have to ask, are the conditions placed on the Hamilton Street and Belsize Avenue permits nothing more than sheer hypocrisy and/or total ignorance by our councillors? For example, how can they in the same breath vote for a (draft) transport policy that REDUCES PARKING REQUIREMENTS, and also vote that applications in the activity centre ADHERE TO THE CURRENT SCHEDULE OF PARKING ‘STANDARDS’? Was all the chest thumping on Tuesday night nothing more than grandstanding? Will our local streets now become parking lots?
Glen Eira Debates 
April 13, 2018 at 3:10 PM
Listened to the recordings. Huffing and puffing by all of them. Doesn’t explain why scores and scores of developments got waivers from this lot in the last couple of years. Wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them.
April 13, 2018 at 5:27 PM
If there is reduced standards then all cars will go into side streets that are already feeling the pressure and with more and more development this can only get worse. Council hasn’t even bothered to look at future development and then work out car parking demand. They are a total joke.
April 14, 2018 at 9:05 AM
I listened to what the Mayor had to say but don’t know what he’s arguing for. He quotes a councillor officer but attributes those remarks to a VCAT Member, which could be misleading. VCAT doesn’t form any part of decision guidelines so it’s puzzling why that’s considered relevant.
He mentions the Planning Scheme and obliquely refers to statutory parking rates, but doesn’t assess the application against the accompanying decision guidelines. There is a reference to future work—always scary when decisions are based on what *might* be done in the future—but at least for the moment it appears Council has broken with its habit of 15 years of waiving visitor parking.
One thing I disagree with is his comment “we do know one extra car park means one extra car on the road going somewhere”. He is confusing car ownership with car use. If people own cars and we don’t want them causing congestion on streets then we’d better provide off-street parking for the times they’re not being used. He has failed to convince me nobody in or around an activity centre will want to own a car.
April 14, 2018 at 10:30 AM
You’re right. Owning a car doesn’t mean more congestion. If parked onsite then it’s not on the road and plenty of people use public transport and keep their cars home all day. Without proper onsite parking the car sits on the street.
April 16, 2018 at 11:41 AM
Are you politely saying that the Mayor has no clue on what he is arguing on? Rescode and a waiver on parking requirements are a part of the gear tools to get through the approval process all in favour of the developers..
April 14, 2018 at 9:25 AM
The whole damn parking thing is totally out of control, streets after street now so congested that they are narrowed to a single lane up the middle causing various problems some dangerous. Traffic Officers like to think they a experts and their job is based on some type of science or logic.
I say what a joke, they are totally delusional.
Whatever these traffic engineers are taught or learn at these pseudo colleges is written for them by the developers to maximise their potential to rort the amenity that has so carefully built up over the last 100 plus years.
This is urban cannibalism; the eating up of past amenity at a healthy profit of course, whilst they are giving back absolutely nothing, the truth is we are paying on every level, environmentally, socially, and economically to support their rorting.
April 22, 2018 at 12:00 PM
This situation only occurs when the councillor’s cannot unite to form a common front to instruct the council what the policy is; and that should be obvious…no wavering on parking. Stick to it or VCAT/Developers will punish you