Editorial: Parking should not be hurdle

I remember the day my partner and I came to check out Tauranga to see if it was somewhere we could imagine ourselves living.

We loved everything we saw but there was one thing that drove us wild.

All we wanted to do was sit down and have a beer on The Strand while we tried to sort out a home to live in. We spent about half an hour on this hot summer day driving up the CBD's main streets, side streets and the waterfront carparks trying to find somewhere to park.

Seeing a car's reverse lights finally go on was something like finding a four-leaf clover in the backyard.

Almost two years on, finding a park in Tauranga is still something that more often that not sees me end up mouthing unladylike expletives. Maybe it's because I'm from a smaller town where I was used to being able to find a park on my first lap of the main street.

Or maybe I'm just like the other people who were circling behind me like preying hawks when I was again looking for a park on the waterfront on the weekend - a bit on the lazy side.

At a resource consent hearing this week, Tauranga bar and restaurant owners protested about Tauranga City Council's plans to get rid of the 300 customer carparks on the waterfront.

Being told that the CBD's "surplus capacity" will still give patrons somewhere to park must have been incredibly frustrating for them.

The surplus capacity is the percentage of parks that don't have cars in them as revealed by parking surveys or analysing council data.

But these are business owners who are likely to be hearing from their patrons how long they had to circle before finding a park. Some will say we just have to get used to walking a bit further to get to the shop or bar we need to be at.

When there are restaurants with parking at the front door elsewhere, and Bayfair with all its parks, it's not going to be an easy habit to break.

You only need to add high heels or kids to the occasion and walking from Elizabeth St or Spring St to The Strand on a cold winter's night is not an attractive proposal.

The concerns of these restaurateurs need to be taken seriously as we get further down the track with the future of the waterfront.

It's time to stop talking about what habits we should change and look at what can be done for these business owners if the next stage in the council's plan to change the waterfront goes ahead.