Consider parking meter system in City

Steps have to be taken to ensure that Historic Bridgetown does not become an overgrown car park, and as such one businesswoman is suggesting that new initiatives should be considered to prevent indiscriminate parking in the City.

 

The call has come from Sharon Christie of the Barbados Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI). She was delivering remarks yesterday morning at the launch of the Bridgetown Urban Renaissance Project and the Artscape Mural Programme on Lower Broad Street in the City.

 

“Vehicles moving through the City is one thing, but the City becoming an overgrown parking lot is not progressive. We need people in the City and we need people to be able to access the City. I wonder if it is not time to explore a short-term parking meter type system for the key areas of the City,” she said.

 

Christie suggested that such meters would work well along the Inner Basin, Lower Broad Street and the Parliament Buildings as cars are often found parking outside of the designated parking areas.“We have to bring people to Bridgetown and that means we have to keep it safe and we have to keep it clean… The Chamber had previously offered to actually double the public cleaning capacity of the City but that particular initiative apparently couldn’t work. So maybe we need to revisit that and try to find another way to do that,” she said.

 

Meanwhile, referring to the extensive work carried out by the World Heritage Committee with respect to listed buildings in the World Heritage Site, she urged the Ministry to promote the buildings, suggesting that many Barbadians do not appreciate them. She also lamented the fact that too many historic buildings are left vacant or in disrepair.

 

“I consider it an absolute disgrace to our heritage. These buildings afford us the wonderful opportunity, not only to enhance our tourism product, but also to earn additional foreign exchange and to create jobs. Heritage is a business and we need to recognise that,” she maintained.

 

With that in mind, she stressed that where proposals for projects to be carried out in the area are actually approved, developers should be given a timeline in which to complete them, as too often projects are promoted but no work is carried out. She maintained it is important that Government insists that if the private sector is given concessions to do such projects, that the contract states they must complete it within a specified time frame. (JRT)