It is unlikely Dublin City Council will increase residents’ parking permit fees from a current annual rate of €50, or €80 for two years, to €225 a year in some parts of the city, as was proposed as an option for new parking control bylaws. Not even Green Party councillors could stomach knocking on doors to cheerily put forward that proposal to their street-parking constituents.
However, it is not unjustified that permit charges would be increased somewhat from their current rate. Council officials point out that there is manifest unfairness between the parking charges for people using pay-and-display metered parking and those who are resident in the street. The two are not directly comparable, for sure. But in the last 14 years there have been no increases in residents’ permit fees while hourly parking rates have risen by approximately 30 per cent.
At a council meeting on Wednesday no councillor supported the introduction of a €225 charge, but most conceded there should be some increase, and that modest incremental rises would be a fair way to adjust the permit fee. The council’s head of traffic and transport Brendan O’Brien concluded at the meeting that he would return with further options.
This may serve to moderate what could be perceived as an inequality between car driving residents and visitors to an area. However, a more obvious unfairness is in the disparity between what residents have to pay to store bicycles outside their home and what those owning cars have to pay for the same space.
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The council, after a decade of delays, has awarded a contract to bike hire company Bleeper to provide 300 secure bike storage spaces across the city. The so-called bike bunkers, which take up one car parking space, can accommodate six bicycles. The annual charge for a space is €100 per bike, twice the current residents’ parking charge. A family with six bikes which is lucky enough to secure one of the limited number of bunkers would thus pay €600 annually. So much for encouraging people to get on their bikes.
