Park 'n' grow formula Date: 29/12/2008 Publication: Illawarra Mercury
Park 'n' grow formula
Parking in Wollongong is a nightmare.
Crown Central used to have free parking for the first hour. I don't shop there any more. Instead, I drive to Miranda where there is free all-day undercover parking and I shop there.
It seems that Wollongong businesses don't recognise the extent of escape spending. If they did, they would arrange free parking.
But Wollongong City Council is the main culprit. It has failed to plan and orchestrate development of suitable parking facilities in our city.
With its inaction, council has failed to fulfil a basic community need and the resulting lack of customers affects local businesses.
Major retailers do not develop larger stores due to lack of custom. It is a cycle of negativity.
The solutions seems so obvious: provide the parking and business growth will occur.
Instead, the small-minded decision-makers in council have decided to install parking meters.
That does not solve the problem. It creates a revenue stream for council, and the State Government takes its cut of the parking fines.
However, it does nothing to create more parking spaces.
Visitors to our city hate coming here as they cannot park conveniently to attend events at WIN Entertainment Centre.
They get fined by zealous rangers on a mission to cash up the council and the State Government.
We all lose from this and I blame the council.
Lyn Read, Figtree.
Council ineptitude
I note that, in response to the uproar caused by the latest parking blitz, a Wollongong City Council spokesman stated that council "enforced the Australian road rules which protect road, pedestrian and public safety".
This appears reasonable, but would be more acceptable if council applied this policy uniformly and fairly.
At the same time as council is stating this policy, it condones the unlimited parking and traffic movements that occur illegally throughout Stuart Park.
I have on record that council has known about this problem for years but has chosen to do nothing about it, even though it is intensely dangerous, particularly to children, and abuses a treasured asset.
No doubt it is easier to catch a Wiggles fan and hospital users than to solve this problem.
As pointed out by other correspondents, the lack of parking and infrastructure provided by council is really at the heart of the matter.
How can council spend $8 million dollars on the Bulli Tops visitors' centre when the money could have been used to improve parking and infrastructure?
At $1.5 million dollars the visitors' centre was a lemon, but at $11 million dollars it is a citrus orchard.
It is also a monument to council's inability to establish meaningful priorities, its lack of professionalism and its inability to handle projects.
Alan Towers, North Wollongong.
Violent games we play
Catherine Larkman is right ("Bullies reflect society", Sun-Herald, December 21) .
As she said, children do enter school with many values already in place.
They can absorb enough trauma from their older brother's violent computer games to expect and possibly re-enact this trash.
Whether it's picked up this way or genetically they are predisposed and it is reinforced, it's often carried through to primary and high school, into adulthood and sometimes into jail.
The lives of kids that don't have pushy or aggressive natures can be made miserable, because some parents seem oblivious to the amount of violent entertainment to which their children are often subjected.
Brian Johnson, Gymea.