The City Council’s planned rule changes include things like citywide parking passes for visitors, the ability for residents to pay less for a smaller area of permitted parking, or special permits for supplies or caregivers. It also eliminates portable parking permits or free parking for electric vehicles. “There is no consensus at the moment on what the amount should be, but there is an agreed way to get there. There is a general consensus that whatever is collected for parking will be put back into parking. But at this point, there is no one who can answer the question of what that price will be,” Sedeke said. He said a discussion about the price now is premature and a final proposal for changes needs to be prepared first. Municipal officials have produced a first draft of the changes, which individual town halls were allowed to send comments on until January 30 this year. The council will now deal with them and prepare a document to be discussed by expert groups. Only then will the coalition discuss the document, Sedeke said. Participants in the discussion agreed that they believe parking is too cheap. Residents pay CZK 1,200 per year. Councillor and former deputy mayor Adam Scheinherr (Prague for himself) said parking fees should be CZK 3,000 to 4,000 a year to encourage some drivers to park elsewhere than on the street or sell their second car. In the city centre, he said, the occupancy rate of underground garages is only 50 percent. The reason is that the price for parking on the street is the same as in a garage. Street parking should be 30 percent more expensive, Scheinherr said.
How to address the low enforceability of offences?
Miroslav Čadský, head of the municipality’s transport organisation department, said another problem is the low enforcement of offences. Prague 1 councillor Vojtěch Ryvola (without a vote) agreed, saying that all-day parking in a meter is more expensive than a fine. Čadský said changing the law and shifting objective responsibility from the city to the driver would help, for example. If the driver had to prove he or she didn’t park wrong, it would make it easier for the city to enforce fines. In his opinion, this system works abroad. Scheinherr said the difficulty also is that by law, the Technical Road Administration’s (TSK) inspection cars can only check cars parked badly in zones; if they park badly next to it, they no longer deal with them. Paid parking zones were first introduced in the capital in their modern form in 1996 in part of Prague 1, where efforts to regulate traffic had been made as early as 1982. Subsequently, they have expanded and operate mainly in the wider city centre and in their own mode also in Prague 13, 16 and 22. The municipality collects around half a billion crowns a year in parking fees.
Read the full article on blesk.cz (26 March).
