Seventeen parking spaces were removed near a Dairy on Rongotai Road when a new cycle way was installed leading to a decline in business of “50 – 55%” for the Pop-In Candy Store.
“I have lost a lot my regular customers because of the parking, because of the cycle lane,” Pop-In Candy Store, owner Arun Patel said.
“All the bigger vehicles have got no access to the shop anymore… and in the last three months my business has declined 50-55 percent.”
Although there is a 10-minute parking space in front of the shop, Mr Patel said people parked there much longer than that and the council did not move them along.
That was evident when RNZ News visited – one car stayed for over an hour, and all the other (not P10) nearby spaces were occupied.
In addition, Mr Patel said the space was now too small for his regular customers – truckies, couriers and bus drivers – whose depots were nearby.
New cycleway blamed for halving dairy owner’s trade
Sarah Free made a rare appearance in the media to suggest that business impacted by such development needed to be quick to tell the Council, then went on seemingly blame the bus situation for parking problems.
“People on the [Miramar] Peninsula are finding the bus services reasonably unreliable, and I know a lot of people anecdotally have told me they’re actually driving to Kilbirnie and parking in Kilbirnie so they can get on a variety of buses and actually get on one,” she said.
Sarah Free is under increasing pressure around the city with the impact of cycle ways an ever present negative perception often bemoaned in local pages on social media platforms. No hard metrics are available, of course, because that would be far too logical. Hard to say what the real impact has been, but safe to say Sarah Free is in for more of the same criticism.
Despite the recent declaration of a Climate Emergency, the Mayor will be opening a new petrol station in Tinakori this week.
Hamilton-based fuel supplier Waitomo will open its first central Wellington Fuel Stop in Tinakori next week.
As the region’s only low-cost operator, Waitomo’s arrival will bring much-needed competition and choice to the capital, where motorists have been paying some of New Zealand’s highest fuel prices.
Located at 24-26 Hutt Road, the unmanned 24-hour Tinakori Fuel Stop will be officially opened on Tuesday 2 July at 12pm, by Mayor of Wellington City Justin Lester.
Waitomo set to hit the capital
We’ll just leave that one there.
A raft of finger point late last week around buses with everyone wildly waving their digits and running for cover.
We learnt last week that the Regional Council is blaming everyone except itself for the continuing problems with Wellington buses.
RNZ reported from a parliamentary hearing that the council’s chief executive Greg Campbell told MPs a national bus driver shortage and a lack of bus lanes were the two biggest road blocks to fixing Wellington’s bus system. Which would make anyone wonder: why didn’t he deal with the driver shortage and the road blocks before introducing the bus networks?
Blaming everyone else
Indeed. The GWRC is apparently still blaming everyone other than themselves in what must be now the outsourcing fail of the century.
Inside Wellington 