Parking after dark

THREE to four days a week I use the Myers St carpark owned by City of Greater Geelong to park my car while I am at work.

I have been using this carpark now since April 2018 when the Geelong office of Gordon Legal opened in Moorabool St nearby.

I would love not to have to use the carpark. I live within 2km of work and would happily walk to and from home each day.

However, like thousands of other parents in Geelong, we have children who need to be transported to school each morning. In addition, every day after school there are sporting activities to manage for our three children.

The Myers St carpark is one of the carparks in Geelong for which the recent increase in the daily rate to park your car will not be reversed. The increase from $10.80 to $13 a day represents a near 20 per cent increase in cost.

Many daily users of the carpark are nervous about walking to their cars after dark. At my former place of employment, many of the 26 female staff used the carpark each day. The staff were sufficiently nervous about their safety, so we organised walking groups among the staff in winter to ensure at least three or four of the staff would walk together to their cars, particularly as it is very dark in that carpark in winter and the staff did not feel happy walking to their cars on their own.

Last weekend while at the hairdresser, he was telling me that their staff often walk to the carpark via Lt Malop St after dark in winter. He said the young staff have been harassed walking to the carpark and recently someone took a screwdriver to the front passenger door lock of his car in an attempt to break in. He says there was nothing in the car to steal so he could only assume it was an attempt to steal the car itself.

I had a similar conversation with a gentleman waiting for his coffee at Neck of the Woods recently. He finished work and collected his car from the Myers St carpark by 7pm. When he got home and parked the car in his garage he saw that the front passenger door had been damaged in a failed bid to wrench it open. The would-be thief’s revenge was to scrape one side of the car with a sharp object.

If I have an after-hours appointment in the city, I will move my car from that carpark to Moorabool St as I too have been harassed on the way to my car in the Myers St carpark and feel nervous walking into that carpark at night.

If we assume that these incidents are not isolated experiences or feelings, and we now know that on a user-pays basis, the users of the Myers St carpark are going to pay 20 per cent more for parking in that carpark, then the additional funds raised in my view should be allocated to increasing the security of the carpark for its users.

The City of Greater Geelong has done a great job of providing excellent lighting and cameras in the new section of the South Geelong train station carpark and the waterfront carpark among others. In those carparks there is bright lighting throughout and cameras that are prominent so that thieves are deterred from damaging and breaking into cars for fear of being identified.

An increase in the cost of parking your car each day so that you can use the city for work or recreation is unpalatable.

For many, it will now mean that they will park some distance away from their work and walk to avoid the price hike. The effect of this decision will be to create congested residential streets in South and East Geelong.

If the additional funds raised by the price hike were able to be used to improve the safety for the user and bring the carpark up to the standard of others in Geelong, for those who continue to use the Myers St carpark (and other similar city carparks) knowing that the additional cost would be reinvested in the experience of its users’ safety and security would make the increased fee much more palatable.