Importance Of Parking In City Planning

Press, Volume C, Issue 29503, 3 May 1961, Page 23

Importance Of Parking In City Planning

The provision of off-street parking played an important part in the planning of a central business area of a city so that it did not go into a decline as the population moved out of the centre, Professor Harold M. Mayer, professor of geography at the University of Chicago, told members of the Christchurch Regional Planning Authority yesterday. Before taking up his present position. Professor Mayer was director of research of the Chicago Planning Authority. He is in Christchurch for 10 days to give a series of lectures to students at the University qf Canterbury. Members of the authority’s constituent councils and Government department representatives were invited to the meeting yesterday. American planning problems were found in New Zealand, he said, and the text of his “sermon" was “you can’t afford not to plan.” Illustrating the need for planning he told a story of two States which were building highways which were to join, but through lack of planning and co-operation it was found that the connexion was missed by three miles.

Urban Spread Urban areas were "exploding” into the countryside, and 1960 returns showed that cities were losing population —New York lost 200.000 and Chicago 150.000. Even closerin suburbs had shown some decline, although the metropolitan areas as a whole were growing. But people still had to go to the central business areas for work, and the central areas were taking on a new commercial and office character. If the people were to be held and the decline arrested, then planning was needed to change the character of the central area, so that it remained a heart, even though a different kind of heart. One way of doing it was to provide off-street parking. Professor Mayer said, for more persons were using cars to travel to work and they must have a terminal. “We have prohibited park-

ing in the business areas in Chicago and we find that large-scale off-street parking meets the need," he continued. “You can always find parking in downtown Chicago.”

The built-up areas of American cities were not so crowded now as they were some years ago, and in the newer areas there were more open spaces. There had to be. Modern shopping centres had five times as much land for parking as they did for selling in their shops. Traffic engineering had become a profession, and Professor Mayer said he considered it would be well worthwhile if one engineer from each of New Zealand's main centres could be sent to a school in America to learn what was being done in modern traffic engineering.

Serious consideration must be given in New Zealand to parking facilities.