A few days back I wrote a scathing blog post on minimum parking requirements, and how they are a huge hidden subsidy for private vehicles. Not only that, but MPRs actually completely destroy the urban fabric of our town centres.
Let’s take a look at Manukau City Centre as an example. This area has grown from what were simply fields in the 1960s into the biggest hub for all of south Auckland today. If you look at its aerial photograph, it certainly does seem as though a lot of the area is simply carparking though – due to minimum parking requirements:
However, what becomes really scary is if we start colour coding things – red for buildings, green for parks and open spaces, and grey for roads and carparking:
To hazard a guess, I would say perhaps 70% of Manukau City’s land is dedicated to roads or carparks. That’s pretty disgraceful, and means that the whole place feels completely soulless and characterless. It’s also pretty damn pedestrian unfriendly. Surely our town centres don’t have to be like this? Surely we can do better.
If we look at Botany Town Centre, a more recent development (almost completely within the last decade) we see the same kind of pattern:
More places to come in the future! Albany and Westgate seem like particularly shocking examples.
Processing...
Manukau CBD, the gold standard of crap…
I worry about when the “transportation interchange” is completed on Hayman park there and bus and train disembarkers start getting hit by nanas willy nilly…
Well let’s just say Manukau City has a huge amount of potential for intensification!
For comparison could you give us an example of a colour coded town centre where this is not the case?
More than 75% of the land in MCC is owned by the council. Really shows how much the MCC and Len Brown care. Thats why I dont think Len Brown would be a great super city mayor. He’s really good at raising rhetoric and talking about his vision etc. but when it comes to action, there is NOTHING!
Richard, how about Bondi Junction in Sydney?
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=bondi+junction&sll=-36.926412,174.88698&sspn=0.008851,0.01929&ie=UTF8&ll=-33.892238,151.248801&spn=0.004595,0.009645&t=h&z=17
Even Newmarket is completely different: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=newmarket,+auckland&sll=-33.892238,151.248801&sspn=0.009191,0.01929&ie=UTF8&ll=-36.868549,174.776688&spn=0.008858,0.01929&t=h&z=16
The terribly wide roads, like Ronwood ave really terrible as well. Looking at streetview the whole place appears so very anti pedestrian. I think Albany is even worse. It looks like they’ve tried a bit harder to make somewhere that has some sense of place, with the street layout. However this has failed miserably because of the total privatization of the whole area. Also Don McKinnon Drive really splits of the mall from all the smaller developments on the outer edge of the road. Then there’s the disastrous mess of Massey Albany on the other side of a four-lane highway. Completely cut-off for pedestrians, and this also makes things much more complicated for public transport.
The really silly thing is a far superior outcome would be obtained even if the relationship of the roads, parking and buildings was changed to make it pedestrian friendly , and include public space. It doesn’t take much effort, just maybe some evil central planning (watch out for liberttyscott). You could even keep the same amount of parking for now to serve our car dominated lifestyles, however it would be so much easier to redevelop for TOD in the future.
The amount of land taken up is a waste of space. And the beauty of the are would be improved if the car parks were replaced by trees and a lake instead of massive flat areas of concrete.
What is also interesting is wether you have to pay to park your car there. It is unfair PT users have to pay to use the train, but shopping centre drivers don’t have to pay a thing (except petrol). Requiring car parkers to pay for the parking would end the hidden subsidy of the land being taken up.
Instead of minimum parking requirements, we should have maximum ones, so shopping centres will have to charge people to bring cars (or else find massive quees with no parks) and encourage PT.
Hmmm… Interesting, instead of removing minimum parking requirements we introduce compulsory parking fees…
In Sydney the NSW government charges landowners about $900 a year for each off-street parking space that is provided within certain parts of the city – like the CBD and also in North Sydney. Something like this could be phased in for Auckland perhaps. The risk might be that it would just encourage businesses to shift out of the employment nodes, which could make things even worse in some respects (it’s hard to provide PT to serve dispersed employment patterns).
Maximum parking requirements rather than minimum are used successfully overseas, however I can’t see car parking charges going into these shopping malls like sylvia park. The car parks are part of the malls land so council don’t enforce payments in these areas, leaving it to the land owners. However their store owners would not be impressed as all it will do is lower the amount of traffic they are getting through their doors and therefore the amount of sales made.
My thoughts are that minimum parking requirements should be scrapped therefore giving the land owners more freedom of choice. Then we need to make PT more affordable to use, why are people going to use PT to get there when it’s more convenient and cost effective to drive by car. I disagree with penalizing drivers with higher costs, but rather make PT cheaper, and more attractive than private motor vehicles.
Manukau City is very similar to Porirua City, as they both has massive car parking facilities. Funny thing is places such as Levin and Wanganui (with only a fraction of the population) people pay to park on the main street. The time and age of these cities as they were built in the automobile era have lead to these bad land use planning techniques, which have only got worse.
I went and stayed in Porirua where I chose to bike into the city to go to the shops. I only found 5 bike parks at the shopping mall (which took awhile to find) and two other shops in the city with bike parks. Not even the council or the bike shops provided bicycle parking. Now I’m not sure how many people bike to Manukau City or whether there are facilities at all. But if driving the car is so simple (as parking is free), sustainable transport initiatives are virtually impossible to implement with success.
Minimum bicycle parking rules must also be part of all district plans for new developments and councils should also provide rate subsidies for companies that install bicycle parking facilities outside their main entrances.
Encouraging the provision of bikeracks makes a lot of sense.
It certainly is the more recent shopping centres that come out the worst in terms of the over-provision of parking. Places like Ponsonby and Parnell seem to get by fine with hardly any off-street parking.
The Auckland City Council owns five parking buildings in the CBD… Obviously the one under Aotea Square can’t be transformed that easily but what about the other four being demolished and the empty sites sold with the money put into the City Underground Rail Link..?
Yeah, while I’m generally not in favour of councils selling their assets I would have no problems with Auckland City Council selling off its parking buildings. As long as they demolish them first!
Josh, your pic of Bondi Junction is slightly misleading: Sydney Enfield drive is elevated and you can park underneath. I wouldn’t hold up Sydney as a shining example of public planning or transport policy, either. Note that the train line ends at Bondi Junction because the Eastern Suburbs plutocrats don’t want the plebs disgorged directly onto their beach (that is more or less the truth).
Yeah Sydney certainly isn’t perfect, and there is parking located under that road. However, when you compare it with somewhere like Manukau City the contrast is quite incredible.