The Phillip Island and San Remo Visitor Economy Strategy, written in 2016, proposes introducing a bridge toll with the option for pricing incentives for travel outside peak travel periods, as well as park-and-drive where possible to make congestion more sustainable. Photo: Coral Jones.
In this second week of a new series – which explores planning: our future – we look at traffic and parking.
Phillip Island – and to a lesser extent San Remo – are natural bottlenecks and with the resident and tourist population growing annually, pinch points are quickly seen in congestion on roads and towns. Here we explore the pressures and possible solutions.
The Phillip Island and San Remo Visitor Economy Strategy, written in 2016, states Phillip Island should have an optimum capacity limit of 24,500 visitors per day, while the bridge has a carrying capacity of 1500 vehicles per hour.
The strategy states the island receives 18 per cent of its annual visitation in January, which is about 28,600 visitors per day on a peak day.
“While the region’s infrastructure copes with this level of visitation, its optimum capacity is slightly lower than these peaks,” the strategy states. “It is the aim of this strategy to shift demand to off-peak periods.”
Visitor numbers to Phillip Island and San Remo could reach nearly 3.5 million visitors by 2035, it said. Yet despite this, the island has seen a decline in spending per visitor since 2008.
A high proportion of day visitors means the average length of stay is much lower than the state average. As such, the strategy recommends the focus should be on quality of spend rather than quantity of visitors.
It proposes introducing a bridge toll with the option for pricing incentives for travel outside peak travel periods, as well as park-and-drive where possible to make congestion more sustainable.
Car parking squeeze
Also in 2016, Bass Coast Shire released the Cowes Revitalisation Project Traffic Management Impact Assessment to ease the town’s increased parking and traffic congestion.
It showed Phillip Island Road carries about 10,000 vehicles per day during off-peak periods, which rises to 14,000 per day in holiday seasons and is growing at five per cent annually, with Cowes needing 310 additional car parks by 2016 and 630 by 2036.
The report proposed speed limits in Cowes’ town centre be decreased to give pedestrians more priority, while parallel parking should replace the current angled parking, and in the future multi-deck car parks could be introduced.
“Modelling shows the roads in the centre of the study area are nearing saturation levels,” the report states. “Through analysis, an issue facing Cowes transport system now and over the next 20 years is car parking.”
