Parking on a small island with limited public road space is always a hot topic, particularly in a commercial area with a high turnover.
As an entity with an interest in how we create a modal shift into more sustainable modes of transport, we often get involved with local councils that want to suggest pedestrian or shared space areas from which parking might be excluded.
More often than not, that is a concept that is shot down by shop owners who fail to understand that it’s not cars that actually buy their products but people who can walk freely from shop to shop. Someone parked outside your shop or café for two or three hours brings on average just that person and rarely the whole family car filled to the brim with people.
In fact, in numerous studies, bikeways and good pedestrian infrastructure encourages people into commercial areas to spend money. It’s one of those quirky inverse laws that basically comes down to people spend more, cars in reality don’t, as long as there are lots of different ways to reach that commercial area.
In Malta, however, the fear that people won’t walk from a bus stop or car park is enough to galvanise the local shopkeepers into a pitchfork waving frenzy, often armed with their lawyers in council meetings, fighting tooth-and-nail, defending one or two parking spots outside their premises. We’ve even seen the loss of a cycle track in Marsascala this year for the same reason. A track, I might add, that has not been replaced by any other alternative to date, despite ministerial promises to look into it.
Couple that to a failed-to-launch-parking-policy, an increased demand for motorcycle parking next year and the subject of space gobbling commercial ‘parklets’ becomes a contentious one.
Bikeways and good pedestrian infrastructure encourages people into commercial areas to spend money
Now a parklet is a parking space that is turned over to a small landscaped oasis that has benches and encourages people to see normally grey streets devoid of plants or colour changed into somewhere where people want to go, rather than have to. A nice place to walk to – and they often spend more.
The Maltese twist on this, of course, is the commercial parklet, which is just a platform with tables and chairs that maximises a café’s or restaurant’s number of covers at the expense of a parking space or two. It’s Maltese double parking on steroids, and it’s a growing trend.
But that goes against the traditional village mayoral effigy burning pitchfork protest that defends private car parking spaces on public land.
So what exactly is going on? How would commercial establishments react to non-commercial, true parklets outside their premises that gave public space back to the public? Is there perhaps a reasonable argument for commercial parklets only being granted if they sponsor a non-commercial one?
Are commercial parklets saying firstly that it’s OK to gobble up a parking space and replace it with, say, eight or 10 covers without knowing or caring where those covers will come from?
As more patrons are more important than immediate parking space, should we invest in more Bisazza Street-type areas because that argument about parking isn’t worth a fig right now? Taken to an extreme, perhaps, the argument that more money is made in areas where cycle lanes replace parking space has some weight after all.
Is this what commercial outlets are now saying? Is it a case of we don’t care how you come here, just come anyway?
Well, if that’s the case can we have our cycle track back, please?
Jim Wightman is PRO of the Bicycling Advocacy Group (Malta).