Hi-tech initiative to control paid parking in city centre
Rochelle de Kock
IF YOU plan to visit the Port Elizabeth city centre in the near future, prepare to pay for parking.
Nelson Mandela Bay councillors have approved a parking management system in which 1329 bays in Port Elizabeth's city centre will be manned by attendants carrying mobile meters, replacing the conventional coin-operated parking metres.
The aim of the project, which will be managed by the Mandela Bay Development Agency (MBDA), is to beef up parking security in the CBD while creating formal jobs for marshals.
Councillors who sit on the economic development, tourism and agriculture portfolio committee gave the initiative the thumbs-up yesterday, but it will stillhave to be approved by the safety and security committee – and eventually by the full council.
The mobile devices, which will be linked to a traffic operation room, will capture vehicle information and calculate the parking fee due.
According to MBDA chief executive Pierre Voges's report to the portfolio committee, the levy collected from motorists will be divided between the MBDA, parking marshalls and the company that will provide the mobile devices.
People who refused to pay the parking levy would be charged harsher fines which would be posted to motorists, and the money derived from those parking fines would go to the municipality, Voges said. The streets that will be affected are: Strand Street, Govan Mbeki Avenue, Chapel Street, Whites-Western Road, Donkin Street, Parliament Street, Clyde Street, Rink Street, Belmont Terrace, Robson Street, Bird Street, Rose Street, Havelock Street, Lawrence Street and Stanley Street.
"The MBDA has conducted an investigation in other cities and is of the opinion that the implementation of a mobile parking meter system ...will be more efficient and result in an increase in revenue generation from the use of the parking bays; a security presence in the area of the designated parking bays; [and] job-creation and the control of the proliferation of informal parking attendants," Voges wrote in his report.
At the meeting, councillors raised concerns about outsourcing the services to a private company, but Voges assured them the MBDA would manage the project and only the technology would be outsourced.
