Plan to cut Christchurch city centre car parks faulted

Situation on 29 September

The Press today published an article on proposals for Madras and Barbadoes Streets. If you have missed the article, it is available online.

Artist impression of the completed street

The second sentence of the article says: "Christchurch City Council plans for cycle lanes, trees and landscaping will mean the loss of 105 parking spaces in Madras and Barbadoes
streets, or nearly half of the current spaces on the sections to be revamped." (emphasis added by us)

This of course gives the impression that due to the provision of cycle lanes, car parking is to be removed. This is not correct. The loss of car parking is due to the proposed street trees in what is now the parking lane. The proposed cycle lane is always to the outside of all of that.

We have spoken to the Press about this, and they accept that on the face of it, it would appear that they have made a mistake. They will look into this further tomorrow and if they find that they got it wrong, then they will put it right.

Thanks, that would be appreciated.

If you want to check out the proposals yourself, please follow the following links:

Madras Street - first section

Madras Street - second section

Barbadoes Street

Situation on 30 September

Today’s editorial goes a long way towards rectifying yesterday’s wrongly created impression that the proposed provision of cycle lanes results in the parking loss. The headline (To park or cycle?) chosen for the editorial, though, again seems to imply that the parking loss is caused by the cycle lanes. Whilst the editorial itself makes it very clear that this is not the case, fact is that many readers of the opinion page will see the headline, know which issue it refers to, but not read the editorial itself.

As such, the choice of the headline was at best unfortunate, and at worst, it has further inflamed the issue.