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Our Locality: The eye of the storm 
The Urban Village is less than 5km from the centre of Sydney and is boxed in on three sides by main arterial roads. These are part of Sydney’s lifeblood as they carry goods, tourists, visitors and commuters to and from Sydney’s South, East and International airport.
Nearby are three cinema complexes (Fox Studios, Academy Twin and Verona), Aussie Stadium and the SCG, Australia’s busiest and most famous nightclub, restaurant and retail strip (Oxford Street) and a major hospital. Within the Urban Village is the CoFA campus.
Every day students, shoppers and leisure seekers approach the area looking for through routes or parking spaces. Thanks to years of resident action, council wisdom and enduring vigilance both parking chaos and traffic gridlock have for the most part been averted. Both residents and CoFA (as the largest non-resident parking demand generator) share the benefit.
The Urban Village is a calm eye in a massive storm. It wasn’t always that way though and now the calm is seriously threatened.
| Traffic management
In 1977 the 'Little Napier Street Precinct Action Plan’ was launched to restrict commercial and through traffic. By 1981 50 houses resided in pedestrian-only mews with access via Selwyn Street cul-de-sac (the same place CoFA is now focusing on in its redevelopment proposal). Pedestrian-friendly landscaping of these closed streets added to the tranquillity of the Urban Village.
Buoyed by this success, from 1996 to 2000 the community, Council, RTA came together to introduce the Area 15 Local Area Traffic Management (LATM) Scheme. After extensive community participation, due legal process and traffic planning surveys, this new one-way circuit complete with traffic calming devices, angle parking and on-street landscaping was opened. It discourages non-resident through-traffic and has massively enhanced the Urban Village.
While the LATM scheme calms and reduces through-traffic, some motorists ignore “No Entry” signs and drive the wrong way up one-way streets to use the Urban Village as a 'rat-run'. According to some estimates, as many as 200 to 500 motorists each month.
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Parking issues
Built before motor traffic was even conceived of, the streets of the precinct are packed full of narrow terrace houses. Narrow house frontages prioritised land use for buildings over roads, and two stories meant even more people could fit into small parcels of land. This is original high-density housing and unlike modern buildings the only car park is on the street.
On street car parking is an amenity to all and Council, alarmed at the day and night non-local parking demands in the area decided to at least give residents a fighting chance. In 1976 the Area 15 Resident Parking Scheme was introduced and in 2004 is tightly managed with a 1 hour restriction 18 hours a day.
Yet despite such a scheme designed to tip the odds in favour of the residents, Area 15 is now completely saturated, due to both rising levels of non-resident demand and Council enforcement that doesn’t deter over-stayers. For example the South Sydney Parking Study formally adopted by South Sydney Council in December 2003 shows just 404 on-street parking spaces in the precinct. As well as serving residents, according to CoFA (May 2001 public statement)
200 students per day use their cars to attend the college, a situation unthinkable in 1976 when most homes (let alone students!) didn’t have a car.
Residents already face frustrating waits in their cars for a parking space, sometimes over an hour and literally have to race against other competing cars when one becomes available. The latest CoFA proposal threatens to turn an existing crisis into a complete debacle.
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