‘Like a caravan park’: St Kilda street parking rules leave council hamstrung, residents irate

An inner city suburb street looks “like a caravan park” as residents try to force council to shut a loophole allowing boats, dog washing trailers and campers to park in perpetuity.

Melbourne residents have been left fuming as camper vans and trailers are being dumped on their street.

St Kilda East resident Justin and tech entrepreneur Danny Gorog appeared on the Today show on Tuesday morning, in front of a wall of trailers.

They said since the pandemic people realised they could park their trailers on the street.

“It hasn’t been a problem for a while, but now there’s so many of them here that they’re displacing the actual residents, so the residents can’t find a parking spot here anymore,” Justin said.

“We have so little public open space here, and this extra space on this road, we are wanting council to turn it into a park so that we can have somewhere to walk our dogs and have somewhere for the community to use.”

Street view images, like this one from December 2018, show boats and camper vans parked up. Picture: Google Maps

The mobile homes, storage trailers, boats and apparently even dog washing wagons are taking up parking bays on Alexandra Street in St Kilda East, an eclectic but generally well-to-do area a few kilometres south of the Melbourne CBD.

The Port Phillip council is doing what it can, but are stuck between a wheel chock and a jockey wheel as current time, length and weight restrictions do not allow the vehicles to be removed.

“We don’t want to just move the problem away from here. We want to solve this problem,” Just said.

“It positively looks like a caravan park behind you right now,” show host Sarah Abo said.

Founder of issue-reporting application Snap Send Solve, Mr Gorog said illegally parked and potentially displaced people with nowhere else to go was “massive problem”.

A council motion put forward by deputy mayor Louise Crawford gives the gist of the greasy situation.

Long-term storage of caravans, campervans in the area was a longstanding issue, Cr Crawford says in the motion.

Two tarpaulin-clad campers were parked on the street in December 2022. Picture: Google Maps

But the council has “no mechanism” to remove a large proportion of the vehicles.

A vehicle bigger than 7.5 metres long or weighing more than tonne cannot be parked more than an hour, and people cannot camp in vehicles.

But most of the vehicles in question are smaller than the restriction guidelines, and only a small percentage “are determined to be abandoned when following the processes under the Local Government Act”.

“Considering the above, a large proportion of vehicles impacting the local community are parked legally with no mechanism in place to address this issue,” Cr Crawford writes.

Thirteen residents have signed a letter calling for a four-hour parking restriction on the street, and council officers will do a seven-day survey to scope out the situation.

Cr Crawford’s motion is calling council staff to investigate options to reduce the amenity impacts of the vehicles and report back. The motion is expected to be discussed at a council meeting on Wednesday.