Cities with fewer than 100,000 residents, including Sopot, are waiting for legislation that would allow them to charge motorists in city parking lots on weekends as well. Meanwhile, councilors of the Gdynia Dialogue, from which the mayor of Gdynia hails, have proposed changes in the city's parking policy that would provide incentives for car use.
Sopot, along with other resorts besieged by tourists, has been pushing for several years to charge for parking in the city's paid parking zones - including on weekends. Today, only municipalities with more than 100,000 residents can do so on Saturdays and Sundays, while smaller cities and towns that want to force turnover and discourage people from coming by car - do not have the tools to do so.
weekend with fees
The changes are needed all the more because it is on Saturdays and Sundays that resorts receive the most vacationers and visitors. In fact, the Union of Cities and Maritime Communities has appealed for them to the Ministry of Infrastructure. Municipalities such as Kolobrzeg and Hel, among others, are waiting for the amendment. Work is underway at the ministry, and Magdalena Jachim, the mayor of Sopot, hopes it will come into force this fall.
What is the situation in cities that can already demand parking fees from drivers on weekends? In Krakow, for example, fees in the zone apply from Monday to Saturday, while parking is free on Sundays. Warsaw has so far not decided to charge money on weekends, although such proposals have been talked about in the capital for a long time. As for the inner city in Gdansk and Wroclaw - drivers pay for parking in the zone 7 days a week. The situation is different in the downtown zone in Poznan - here we pay from Monday to Saturday.
In Gdynia, against the tide?
Although some local governments are moving in the direction of discouraging residents from using individual transportation, which is necessary today, others still want to go along with drivers. This is the case in Gdynia, where the grouping Gdynia Dialog, from which the city's mayor Aleksandra Kosiorek hails, has proposed a draft resolution liberalizing fees for motorized residents.
The councilors wanted the hours of paid parking to be shortened (from 8 pm - currently, to 6 pm). Drivers with a Resident's Card would receive a large discount for the first 30 minutes of parking (they would pay only 50 cents for this time, today the fee for the first hour of parking is PLN 5.50 in the center and PLN 3.9 in the rest of the zone). In addition, Gdynia Dialog wanted to move away from discouraging residents from owning more cars by lowering the subscription fee for a second car registered at the same address (for the second car it was to be PLN 50/month in the Downtown Paid Parking Zone and PLN 30/month in the rest of the zone).
During Wednesday's city council session, the draft resolution ultimately failed to gain sufficient support from the councilors. Although there is no doubt that parking policy in Gdynia needs to be updated, and it can be expected that the issue will be revisited.
Some of these provisions directly encourage more frequent use of the car," says Lukasz Piesiewicz, councilor of the councilors' club of the Civic Coalition, Urban Movements and the Left, in an interview with AiB . - We had no objections to restricting the paid parking zone in Orlowo and Działki Leśne, as such expectations were voiced by the district councils; moreover, we were willing to discuss reducing parking hours on the condition that the downtown zone would remain paid for longer during the season. On the other hand, we are not operating in a legal vacuum, the city has strategic documents that mention reducing the pressure of individual transportation and limiting car traffic, meanwhile the draft resolution went the other way.
The councilman adds that the proposed changes were not supported by any analysis, and it is unclear how they would affect the turnover and number of cars in the Downtown.
On Wednesday, however, Gdynia councilors approved a parking development project under Central Park and a more favorable price list. At issue is an underground parking lot that was pushed through as part of the development of the six-hectare Central Park, one of the flagship Gdynia investments of former Mayor Wojciech Szczurek. Today, the scenarios floated by opponents of the parking lot are coming true - few people want to use the costly investment (the construction consumed about PLN 32 million).
