City of Ballarat Mayor Ben Taylor has announced that Smarter Parking meters will be removed in the Eastwood Street Car Park.
The new meters were originally put in the Eastwood Street Car Park following community consultation where the feedback from businesses indicated there needed to greater turnover of cars in that precinct.
The car park will return to being a time-limited, two-hour free car park, as this has been reinforced by retailers and other stakeholders as the preferred outcome.
The five coin and card meters from the Eastwood Street Car Park will be used in other locations in the central business district where City of Ballarat has identified a need for meters with a coin option.
The meters and smarter parking signs will be removed this week.
No enforcement will be undertaken in the car park until the smarter parking meters and signs have been taken out and two-hour signs have been reinstated.
After this, the two hour time restriction will be enforced through regular patrols of the car park by the City of Ballarat's license recognition vehicles.
The new Smarter Parking system is now fully operational across the Ballarat CBD, with the system using multiple communications providers to ensure it continues to operate if there are outages on any single network.
Education officers will be on the street in the areas where the system has most recently come online to offer help with the new meters.
The CellOPark app has now been downloaded 10,000 times in the two weeks since Smarter Parking was introduced.
It is understood that some app users have been charged for the full day rate as a result of not turning the app off when their parking session was finished.
City of Ballarat has negotiated that people in this position will be refunded the amount they have been charged beyond the period they stayed in the car park for the rest of this week.
