How free is your parking?

A lot of the writing about parking policies is quite complicated, and in some respects counter-intuitive. So it’s good when you can get the impact of our current parking policies simplified into something that’s quite easy to digest and understand. This 12 page document entitled “How free is your parking?” outlines many of the problems caused by the idea that land-uses should have to provide for parking that they generate: particularly in terms of the economic and transport impact this has.
Interestingly, if you look at residential typologies (different types of housing that you could provide) the need to provide parking (usually two spaces per unit, plus visitor parking) has been shown to frequently make it uneconomic to develop above three levels, unless you jump to nine-levels of more. This is because anything over three-levels of development will usually require underground parking – and that’s so expensive (because of the minimum parking requirements) that developers can’t recoup the costs until they’re building around nine-level or more apartment blocks. So much of that 4-5 level “European” style density that we hope to achieve in our town centres is made extremely uneconomic (and therefore won’t happen) largely because of parking controls.

Obviously, many shops and so forth would continue to provide off-street parking if you took away these controls. However, at least they’d have the choice to put the land to a more economic use if they thought that made more economic sense. Forcing a less economic use, through parking controls, is an enormous burden on developers that makes it much more difficult to achieve the intensification that our land-use planning strategies are trying to encourage.

The transport effects are also very significant: That 12 cents a kilometre value of parking is quite incredible. If we take that to be around $NZ0.17, and then consider that a typical car might get 10km per litre of petrol, that’s a doubling of the price of petrol (around $1.70 a litre up to $3.40 a litre) to truly take into account the value of parking that is provided “free” to car-users. The $0.12 a kilometre comes from research undertaken by Todd Litman, and can be accessed here.

I think there are the beginnings of a change in attitude towards parking regulations here in New Zealand. In a number of recent District Plan Changes, such as those relating to Wynyard Quarter and Sylvia Park, it is clear that there is at least a basic understanding that the more parking you provide, the more cars you will encourage to the area. While of course this is only part of the reason to remove minimum parking requirements, and in some cases impose maximum controls, it is certainly a step in the right direction. It seems obvious to me that if Auckland City Council is, for example, worried about the traffic impacts that an expanded Sylvia Park might have on surrounding roads, the best way to control that is to limit the number of additional parking spaces provided. After all, that is what will limit the number of vehicles accessing the site – if people start to realise that the carpark is always full on Saturday afternoons then they’ll either come at another time or they’ll catch the bus or train. All of which are good outcomes for the surrounding road network.

However, there are a lot of transport engineers, and planners for that matter, who are very much wedded to the idea of minimum parking requirements and think that the world will descend into chaos without them. So it’ll take some time to convince everyone of the need to change parking regulations.

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