The City of Melbourne tries to put a “positive” spin on it.

Less and less Melburnians are travelling into the city but the council points out they are spending more. To anyone else but the City Council this would be ringing alarm bells. It becoming expensive to visit the city centre and costs in transport and parking in particular adds to the overall bill .

The Council tells us that there is less people coming into the city. The State Government has just upped the City coffers and introduced a consumption tax, this will mean more costs and less people visiting the city in 2007.

We can expect that Melbourne’s retailers will soon call it a day or demand a reduction in the rent as more and more Melburnians seek to do their shopping outside the CDB. No doubts the City Council administration will argue that they need to travel abroad to find solutions to the problem. I can see another shopping tour on the Councillors on their schedule.




Tourists help lift CBD spending by $1.5 billion

City visitors spent an average of $41 every time they came to the CBD last year, compared with $34 two years ago, according to the Central City Users Survey, a biennial snapshot of city trends.

The report found that city visitors spent almost $1.5 billion more than they did in 2004 when the survey was last taken.

Last year, CBD visitors spent an average of $22.5 million every weekday and $24.5 million on weekends.

While the average amount spent every day by city visitors was $15 ? presumably by city workers ? an average spend of $145 a day by interstate and international visitors pushed up the average daily spend to $41.

The survey found that just under half of the city’s 543,000 daily weekday visitors were aged under 30. It also found that 18 per cent of those surveyed said they visited the city centre less often.

There were 72,000 tourists in the city each day; half from interstate, and 31,000 from overseas.