If there’s one planning rule that does more damage to public transport than any other, it is minimum parking requirements. These are the District Plan Rules that state something along the lines of “for every residential unit there must be at least two off-street parking spaces provided”, or “for every 40 square metres of office space, there must be at least one parking space provided”. These rules infest our District Plans everywhere, with the one exception being Auckland’s Central Area District Plan, where thankfully common sense has prevailed that the CBD would rather suck if filled up with parking garages. Here’s a classic example, from the Isthmus Section of the Auckland City Council District Plan:
Obviously there is a reason why councils have minimum parking requirements in their District Plans, and that is to ensure that the roads don’t get clogged up with people looking for a parking space. However, what minimum parking requirements actually do is provide an enormous hidden subsidy for those who choose to drive, compared to those who choose to use public transport, or walk, or cycle. There are ways in which on-street parking could be controlled – through the use of designating particular areas for short-term parking, or operating residents-only parking permit schemes. I mean, Parnell and Ponsonby seem to get away just fine without enormous amounts of off-street parking. People might even choose to take the bus instead of the hassle of trying to find a parking spot.
But what makes minimum parking requirements really really bad is how they are, effectively, a giant subsidy for car users. Let’s take the example of a shopping centre, say Westfield Albany (as it has acres and acres of parking). All the land which is used for parking is valuable and expensive land, especially in a future town centre like Albany. The cost of providing each parking space varies, but is often considered to be around $30,000 – multiply that by the few thousand spaces that your average mall provides and we start to see some really really big amounts of money being dedicated to the provision of parking. If it wasn’t required to be used for parking, the land could be turned into other buildings – which as well as being more economically productive would also create a place which looked far nicer (I’m yet to come across anyone who likes the look of a parking lot). But anyway, because the land for each carpark is valuable, and generally outside the CBD people don’t pay for their parking directly, the mall owners need to make back that money somehow.
Of course, there’s only one way for Westfield (or any other shop that has to provide parking) to make that money back, and that’s to charge a higher rent than they would otherwise have to. And there’s only one way for the shop owners to make back that money, and that’s to charge higher prices. When you buy your $10 lunch at a mall, perhaps 50c of that’s paying for your parking – whether or not you drove to the mall. While most people currently do drive to malls (well you’re paying for the privilege anyway, public transport to them is often rubbish at weekends, so no surprises there) having specific planning rules that reinforce this auto-dependency and potentially force mall-owners to provide excess parking seems a bit daft, to put it mildly.
What really annoys me though, and it’s the case with a lot of planning rules, is the assumption that the more parking spaces that are provided, the better the outcome is. We have a minimum level of provision, but no maximum – giving off the impression that more is better. Just like other daft planning rules where we have minimum setbacks from the road for dwellings – with the assumption that the further the dwelling is back from the road the better the outcome is (never mind that most European cities build right up to the street creating a vibrant urban environment). Or minimum lot sizes, with the assumption that the lower the density we have, the better it must be (usually at the same time District Plans have great introductions talking about the scourge of urban sprawl – hypocrisy anyone?) Clearly, minimum parking requirements are useful to nobody but traffic engineers.
Here’s an extract from the abstract to a very well put together research paper into the negative effects of minimum parking requirements – the article as a whole makes for quite compelling reading:
District plans continue to mandate the provision of vast amounts of parking for most new developments. Parking standards are based on the demand for free parking at the peak hour of each individual site, which creates an oversupply and fails to recognise the value of land used for car parks. This approach reduces the supply and thus drives up the price of urban land available for economically productive uses (residential, commercial and retail) and distributes the costs throughout the economy. Minimum parking standards undermine sustainable city development by inhibiting compact growth and subsidising single-occupant vehicle trips.
The solution seems obvious – let the developer decide. In some cases a developer may wish to invest in a large parking area, because it’s worthwhile for them to do so. In other cases, they might do the sums and work out it makes more sense for them to promote public transport as a way of getting people to their shop/mall/whatever. If good public transport is already provided why should they be forced to provide unnecessary parking spaces that are expensive and generally pretty ugly? Similarly for residential developments, if a developer is working on a block of apartments that will mainly be aimed towards pensioners, why the heck do they need to provide two spaces per unit? The forced over-provision of parking spaces might add a few thousand to the cost of each apartment, either putting it out of reach of someone looking to buy it, or cutting into the business case of the proposal going ahead in the first place.
To end, here’s an excellent video put together on the issue.
Let’s hope that when the future Super City formulates its new District Plan, that common sense prevails and we give minimum parking requirements the boot.
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Exactly; it’s time for true cost accounting in our transport infrastructure!
This is a huge subsidy…
It must end, I think putting together a short sharp package of info about; GDP comparisons between PT dependant cities versus car dependant ones, minumum parking requirements and how addicted we are as NZers to imported cars using imported oil (and the complication peak oil and climate may have on this) is a good idea, then e-mail it to every reporter, community board member, councillor, mayor, MP and minister in the country, is a good idea…
Jezza that’s an excellent idea, just pulling it off might be quite a challenge. I guess my hope is that through this blog I can slowly piece everything together in a coherent manner that’s reasonably easy to read. I know that quite a few local government servers access this page throughout the day – hopefully those reading have a bit of power to make some change. This is complicated stuff, talk of hidden subsidies and the like.
Perhaps a comparison of various “Pacific rim” cities would be a good way to go about it. Showing how our auto-dependence is likely to be negatively affecting our economic performance.
I seem to remember that a big chunk of our current account deficit is the result of importing oil and cars. Getting some more figures on that stuff would be a powerful tool.
It’d take a couple of days I reckon to figure out what to say, get realiable figures then summarise it into a couple of hard hitting pages… Something to ponder…
It’s about $7 billion of our $9 billion current account deficit… The main reason I’m pro-PT is for economic reasons… It doesn’t make sense for NZ to be car dependant, not when we have some of the best power reserves in the world and we don’t make our own cars or have our own oil… Too much of our GDP is spent on transport and when you factor in the environmental and social positives it becomes a no-brainer…
The CBD rules have seen a few companies take up the pro-public transport stance too. Telecom’s new campus on Victoria St has fewer parks than before and is claimed to be located to be close to public transport – bit of a stretch given Britomart is surely the hub, but at least the car park numbers are down!
Hence the huge secondary economic benefits of building the CBD Rail Tunnel. It would bring most of the CBD within a 5 minute walk of one of the three (Britomart, Midtown and K Road) train stations. That would mean less need for providing parking.
How are Auckland City Council dealing with parking requirements for developments in Newmarket?
There’s a core parking area which will have both minimum and maximum parking requirements. It’s still pretty pathetic though, as that core area is very very limited.
The issue is wider than just the number of parks, it is also there location in relation to the surrounding area. Done poorly they can lead to some terrible Urban Design outcomes, especially if they front onto a major street. Vast areas of tarmac fronting main roads really kill the street life and discourage people from walking. So this is another area that needs to be regulated/controlled. It will be rather difficult to have strict rules around this area, maybe something the Urban design Champion or panel needs to asses for larger developments.
The latest regional parking strategy uses parking maximums for town centres at least. It’s a start. Details on the ARC website: http://www.arc.govt.nz/albany/index.cfm?96E5CADA-145E-173C-98DD-C8C900AB4009
“The parking strategy replaces minimum parking standards with maximum parking standards for the region’s high-density, mixed-use town centres.”
Luke, absolutely. Just look at a place like Manukau City on Google Earth. It seems like the place is about 80% carpark. This totally ruins it as a coherent town centre.
Sacha, yes the ARC is slowly moving in the right direction. Slowly.
One thing I’ve been planning on doing for a while when I find the inclination to do so is to create a ‘parking map’ of Auckland.
Go into the closest zoom on Google Maps and download/connect the bits together to form Greater Auckland and mark all the areas that I can see off-street marked carparking. Be interesting to see what the land distribution looks like after doing that. I wouldn’t mind betting a solid 10-15% of our land is taken by parking.
That would be quite interesting Trickster. I’d be particularly fascinated to work out the percentage of places like Albany, Wairau Park, New Lynn and Manukau City that were dedicated to car-parking. It would be even more fascinating to calculate the areas dedicated to parking, then work out the value of that land – and come up with a big ugly figure showing how much of a subsidy providing this parking really is.
Wellington’s urban core shows what is possible when minimum parking requirements are removed. Parking becomes de-coupled from housing. People buying a new aprtments have the choice of whether to buy a car park or alternativly a bigger apartment (or just save the money). A carpark adds around $30,000+ to the cost of an apartment. Likwise when renting there is a choice regarding having a car park. Many apartments for example in my building have no car park. If a resident wants to park a car they either rent a car park in one of the nearby parking buildings, of if available one of the few in the building. Carparks have a market value around $50 per week. Paying this much is a BIG disincentive to having a car unless it is absolutely essential. As a result I recall data showing that around half of households in the city have no car and over 70% of people walk to work. Of course rents are cheaper for apartments that have no on site parking.
This decoupling also facilitates older buildings being converted to residential as they require no onsite parking which can be challenging in heritage buildings and buildings with narrow frontages. Residents just lease a car park if required.
Ah the beauty of facing people with the true cost of parking a car rather than bundling it up with rent/mortgage costs.
Yes LX the same situation is visible in Auckland’s CBD where there are restrictions on the provision of parking, rather than a requirement for its provision. You see rentals excluding parking, with it added on.
All of this encourages people to avoid owning or using a car, where that is possible. The decoupling of housing and parking is likely to produce far more efficient urban landscapes, and also contribute significantly to higher use of public transport.
I was listening to a talk from somebody at the Wellington City Council about this yesterday. They mentioned that they removed the min carparking requirements and got lots of criticism from traffic engineers along the lines of “Ah, nobody will ever provide a new carpark ever and the streets will be choked with cars – CHOKED!”
However, when they did a survey to see how many carparks new developments were providing they found that most actually did provide a reasonable number of carparks. Just not as many as they would be required to by min requirements. So it seemed as if the market was managing this issue quite well…
Traffic engineers should stick to engineering roads, and leave the transport policy to the planners and politicians. It’s like asking a butcher to set food policy, the outcomes would be predictably meat focussed.
But I do wonder how streets would become ‘CHOKED!’ with cars if there was no where for them to park, do they expect people who don’t have a park to just drive around the block all day instead?! It’s amazing how supportive these types are of free market, demand based approaches to public transport for ‘efficiency’ and ‘cost effectiveness’, but when it comes to parking there must be rigidly enforced minimums regardless of market demand.