Fed-up residents push for dumped vehicles to be cleared from roads
Streets across Australia have become illegal dumping grounds with caravans, trailers and even boats being parked and abandoned on suburban roads.
There's been a staggering 70 per cent increase in reported cases of abandoned vehicles in just the past 12 months and residents who live on impacted streets are getting fed up.
Melbourne local Justin Halliday told Today his street in St Kilda East used to have a problem with too many untimed parking spaces, but recently people have been taking advantage of that.
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This St Kilda East street went from too much free parking to a graveyard of dumped vans, trailers and boats. Supplied
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"People have realised they can park their campervans, trailers, trucks, dog washers and storage vans here without any time limits and now there's so many of them here that they're displacing the actual residents who can't find a parking spot here anymore," he said.
Justin said he and his neighbours had not got anywhere taking the problem to council over the past few years, but now that the problem was getting media attention, a meeting had been locked in for this week.
"Basically we have so little public open space here and this extra space on the road, we are wanting council to turn it into a park so we can have somewhere to walk our dogs and have somewhere for the community to use," he said.
"And then in the area where residents do need the parking, we want to make sure we have resident-specific parking so people aren't displaced - if they just put parking restrictions in here, these caravans and these trailers and things will just move in front of someone else's house, and we don't want that.
"We don't want to just move the problem away from here, we want to solve this problem."
Danny Gorog of Snap Send Solve (L) and St Kilda East resident Justin Halliday (R) said dumping of vehicles has become a big problem. Today
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Snap Send Solve is an app where Aussies can report illegal dumpers, potholes and other local issues and CEO Danny Gorog said illegal parking of large vehicles had turned into a major problem in recent years.
"Just in the last 12 months, about 137,000 reports of illegally parked vehicles, not only large vehicles, but people parking in the wrong spots or people parking in disabled bays, over driveways and in really dangerous spots around school zones have been reported," he told Today.
Hear what else Justin and Danny had to say in the video above
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