Dear Supporter,
Car Parking On Moore Park
Not having had a response from the Chief Executive of Venues NSW, Kerrie Mather, to the Open Letter I sent to her on 30 January 2022, I wrote a second Open Letter on 7 February in which I called on her to honour the commitment given by her representative to the Sydney Football Stadium Community Consultative Committee on 13 October 2021 that car parking on Moore Park will cease once the new Village Precinct car park is operational. You can see my letter here.
I have received a response from Ms Mather to my first, but not my second letter. You can see this here. While unfortunately Ms Mather’s response is hard to follow, it’s clear the concerns we expressed and the questions we asked haven’t been adequately addressed.
We have conveyed the following comments to the Select Committee examining the Greater Sydney Parklands Trust Bill:
1. Venues NSW focuses on the statement in the Moore Park Master Plan 2040 (completed in 2017) that car parking will only be removed when there is no net loss of event related parking in the precinct. The world has moved on. The original SFS EIS, lodged on behalf of Venues NSW, makes it clear that the Government’s strategy is to reduce reliance on private vehicles and that public transport, including the light rail, has the capacity to offset the loss of parking when EP2 and EP3 are no longer available. In June 2019, the Government said this would happen when the light rail was operational.
2. In referring to the various groups who need to drive and park, Venues NSW seeks to create the impression that they will be massively disadvantaged. They won’t. There will still be plenty of parking available for people in those groups. The cessation of car parking on EP3 and the new SFS car park, combined with dispersed parking (as proposed in the Moore Park Master Plan 2040) in the form of the Randwick Racecourse car park, will mean only 10.2% fewer car spaces.
3. The Green Travel Plan Venues NSW is required to develop for the new Stadium is intended to reduce reliance on private vehicles. The baseline is the 35% of event attendees who come by car (Arup’s Transport Assessment, 2019 SFS EIS). Venues NSW’s proposal that the Plan will target a 5% reduction is only a token response to the EIS strategy and is completely inadequate. We urge the Select Committee to advocate that the Government to require Venues NSW to develop a Green Travel Plan which targets a minimum 10% reduction to 31.5% at the commencement of operation of the new stadium and a further 10% to 28% within five years.
We do not stand alone in arguing strongly for the cessation of car parking on Moore Park. In a late submission to the Legislative Council Select Committee on the Greater Sydney Parklands Bill 2021, all community representatives on the SFS Redevelopment Community Consultative Committee, other than the representative of the sporting codes, have unanimously withdrawn their support for the SFS Village Precinct carpark until Venues NSW provides a firm and dated commitment to remove all grass carparking from Moore Park East. They fully endorse those provisions in the Bill which will make it an offense to park on Moore Park grasslands after 31 December 2023. (If you wish to read the submission, you can do so here. The final five paragraphs are the key ones.)
Michael Waterhouse
President, Saving Moore Park
13 February 2023