Sir, - The Irish Parking Association has over 60 members, representing all sectors of the Inish parking industry. The association has been formed to act as a forum to facilitate discussions and exchange of information on professional parking issues and to the raising of parking standards in this country. The members include most of the major private car park operators and the leading local authorities.
Frank McDonald's feature on multi storey car parks (MSCPs) contained inaccuracies which we felt obliged to respond and comment on. The article opened by stating that half of all spaces in MSCPs were probably being used by commuters. This is totally inaccurate. Day to day operating statistics show that fewer than 10 per cent of parkers in public car parks stay for more than four hours, and only one per cent for eight hours or more.
Your contributor confuses commuters with long stay parkers. A visitor from out of town, planning to spend the day shopping, have a meal and take in a show, will park his car in one car park for the whole day, but that does not make him a commuter. By Mr McDonald's standards and, if his sources are correct, by the traffic engineers standards, this visitor to the city is to be penalised by the imposition of high parking charges. We suggest that the DCCBA and Chamber of Commerce would be unhappy with his proposal. A more refined policy is required if commuters are to be restricted.
Most commuters do not park in multi storey public car parks, but rather are provided with parking by their employers. These spaces are not available to shoppers, and are frequently too far away from shops to be attractive to short stay parkers.
The feature suggests that there is a serious shortage of shopper parking in Dublin city centre. This is untrue, except on Saturdays and in the pre Christmas shopping period when the available spaces are choked with an excess of shoppers - not commuters. A visit to any of the larger public MSCPs will clearly demonstrate that there are plenty of vacant spaces for shoppers on weekdays in Dublin.
The table in the article clearly shows that the total number of parking spaces in the city has grown by just over one per cent in the past six years. As everyone knows, car ownership in Dublin, the same period has boomed. The storey makes no mention of the more than a million square feet of new retail space opened in the city centre, with consequential increased attraction for shoppers. It also fails to highlight the ongoing failure to develop public transport alternatives to meet the needs of Dublin's shoppers, leaving them with little option but to use their cars.
Regarding proposals for "Park and Ride" car parks, it may be useful to point out that developments in the UK and elsewhere have all required massive State or other financial supports to make them viable. Tax incentives will not attract funding to fundamentally uneconomic projects, and so these incentives are inappropriate to this concept. The IPA has offered to co operate with the DTO and other authorities on the development of "Park and Ride", but without any response from these agencies.
Finally, Mr McDonald's suggestions that Government policy statements are misleading is again unbalanced. He says that the IFSC car park should be public, if it is to benefit from tax incentives. The regulations that apply to developments in the IFSC are unique to that location, and the new IFSC car park complies with and benefits from these regulations. Outside of the IFSC, new car parks must be open to the public to gain tax incentives. - Yours, etc.,
Secretary,
The Irish Parking Association,
Beresford Court,
Beresford Place,
Dublin 1.
Frank McDonald writes: If Mr Keilthy has a dispute, it is not with me. All of the figures and policies I cited in the article on multi storey bar parking were taken from official documents - specifically, Dublin Corporation's recent interim survey of car parking in the city, a Dail reply given in February by the Minister for Finance and the provisions of the relevant Finance Acts.