WESTERN Advocate readers have slammed a proposal to change Bathurst’s CBD parking, and they have the backing of local road safety expert Matt Irvine.

A proposal to introduce nose-in parking in the CBD will be raised by Bathurst councillor and traffic committee chairman Warren Aubin at Bathurst Regional Council’s next policy committee meeting.

Cr Aubin told the Western Advocate yesterday that nose-in parking “works brilliantly” and he had observed its successful use in Wagga Wagga, Albury and Dubbo.

“Now, it’s time to look at trialling nose-in parking. It has a lot of positives,” he said yesterday.

“The only thing that could hold us back is that we would have to make some of the changes to infrastructure where we have pedestrian crossings at the start of the block because the kerb would be out of alignment.”

The subject of whether nose-in parking was feasible in the CBD was posed on the Advocate‘s Facebook page yesterday and it received an angry reaction from some readers.

“Lunacy! So we would go from the relative safety of loading prams, wheelchairs, shopping etc into the boots of our cars on the footpath, to effectively standing in the middle of the street to do it?” Nicole Sayers posted.

“This is by far the most stupid thing I have ever heard. Nose out,” Kelsey Alexander wrote.

The idea was backed by some Advocate readers who had also seen the nose-in concept in other locations.

“Nose-in parking is fine, what’s all the fuss about? I went to uni in Wagga and it works fine there. Whether you are reversing in or out there are impatient idiots who want to rush around you and not be courteous and wait,” Matt Holden wrote.

Panorama Road Safety proprietor Matt Irvine joined the debate and said Bathurst’s CBD streets were too narrow for nose-in parking to work.

“It just wouldn’t work, we haven’t engineered the streets correctly,” he said.

“People aren’t going to be able to see what’s coming and they’ll reverse blind out into traffic.

“I’d worry about people putting stuff into their boots and parents with prams at the back of their cars, they’d be standing out amid traffic.”

Mr Irvine said the only way nose-in parking would work in Bathurst was if the streets were wider to allow people to safely reverse into a designated ‘parking only’ lane.

He said this would allow people to safely reverse out of their parking spot and also allow traffic to flow.

Mr Irvine did, however, have an idea to improve parking conditions across Bathurst: introduce 60 degree angle parking, rather than the 45 degrees that is currently in place.

“I wish council would consider that. Sixty degrees allows you to get more vehicles in and it’s a lot closer to what we actually park,” he said.