At Last - Civilisation

Parking meters are going to raise their ugly necks in the South Seas. Suva City Council in May was expected to approve a plan for the installation of 539 meters —the first of them by the end of the year—and Papeete Municipal City Council in April decided to install 420 meters “as soon as possible”.

The question remains; who will be the first to install meters—Fiji or Tahiti?

Meter charges in busy Suva streets were expected to be five cents per half-hour and charges in quiet streets, five cents per hour. Profits were to finance the meters’ installa tion and also provide parking facilities.

Ten or 15 years ago, Papeete was so sleepy that you could fire a cannon down the main street at midday and scarcely hit anything.

Traffic chaos has come to Papeete since the economic boom began in Tahiti six or seven years ago with the large - scale development of tourism and the establishment of the nuclear testing base in the Tuamotus.

In that time, the number of registered motor vehicles throughout French Polynesia has grown from a few thousand to about 18,000. Of these, 16,000 are on Tahiti, which has only about 150 miles of roads.

During business hours, a large pro portion—possibly a majority—of Tahiti’s cars is in Papeete, whose narrow streets and limited area be tween the mountains and the sea are hardly suited for the parking problems of the motor age.

The 420 parking meters to be in stalled in Papeete will be mainly in the Avenue Bruat, on the newly developed seafront promenade, and in the vicinity of the cathedral and mayor’s offices.

They will operate from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. on week days and from 7 a.m. to noon on Saturdays.

The tariffs will probably be 20 francs (20c Australian) per hour; 10 francs per half-hour; and two francs for six minutes. (This compares with 10c per hour in the centre of Sydney).

French Polynesia’s 20, 10 and two franc pieces are the only coins suit able for use in parking meters.

The Papeete municipality expects to raise about six million Pacific francs (SA60,000) a year from its 420 meters.

Death Note: A total of 534 motor accidents were recorded in Papeete last year, resulting in 11 deaths and 223 injuries. Forty-four people were killed on roads throughout Tahiti.

Nearly half of the accidents involved people on motor scooters, and most of them occurred between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m.

Peaceful Papeete just over 100 years ago—and now parking meters.