There was an interesting interview of parking guru Donald Shoup – author of “The High Cost of Free Parking” – on Sunday morning’s national radio. You can listen to the interview here.
Mr Shoup makes some excellent points, recognising the highly political and somewhat irrational feelings which are related to parking. A few points that I think are particularly worth noting for application in Auckland:
- There is legislation in California which requires companies that provide employees with “free” parking to also offer employees the ability to “cash in” their parking spaces for money, which could be spent on using public transport (or just extra money if they chose to walk or cycle). For CBD-based employees in particular, the cost of that ‘free’ parking space might run to a few thousand dollars a year. Shouldn’t you be given the choice about whether you want that or the extra money?
- In order to get around the perception problem of requiring people to pay for on-street parking, the revenue generated should be required to be spent in streetscape improvements for that local area. The idea behind this is that local retailers benefit in two ways: the first is that requiring people to pay for parking ensures a higher-turnover rates for parking spaces and increases the likelihood of visitors finding a space. The second benefit is that a whole new revenue stream gets opened up for streetscape improvements. Maybe a retail area might be quite welcoming of charging for parking if they knew the money generated would pave the streets and pay for other upgrades (this is certainly the experience of what happened in Pasadena, California.)
- Finally, that consideration should be given by tertiary institutes (but it could be any organisation) to provide their students (or potentially employees) with free public transport passes to reduce demand for parking spaces. The idea here is once again that it’s cheaper for that agency to pay for the public transport ride than it would be for them to build a parking building. Considering that our cash-strapped health system managed to recently find more than $10 million for a new parking building at Auckland Hospital, something like this for hospital visitors/staff could be a great idea.
I often say to people that parking policy is the ‘elephant in the room’ when it comes to urban planning. It has such a massive effect on what does and does not get built (the number of times I’ve heard stories about developers not being able to build what they’d like to because the site has not enough room for the mandated number of parking spaces is huge) yet at the same time it appears such little thought goes into our parking policies. Do we really need minimum parking requirements? Are there some places where we might actually want to actively limit the level of parking provided? What basis are our parking requirements formulated from? How can we change the perception of free parking being seen as a birthright?
I really must get around to buying Donald Shoup’s book.
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In response to your proposal that tertiary institutions provide free public transport, note that in Vancouver all University students have to pay $100 per semester ($300/year) for unlimited public transport. Buses and trains run till 3am, and are well patronised. Normal public paying fares in Vancouver are still only $2.50 per trip, and you can transfer on the same ticket for up to an hour’s travel. Most students therefore have no wish to own cars when they are students with unlimited use, and have the mindset of using PT.
As for that ten million dollar parking building, the interest alone on that amounts to about $12,000 a week.
That would buy a lot of bus passes!
@Nick R,
The $10 million building is 400 spaces and they will not be “free” – the current charging regime is around $2-3 /hour,
At a conservative $10 income per park per day you gross 4K per day, 20+K a week, over a year you will easily cover the 700K cost of capital
I suspect that the DHB will actually turn a nice little profit on this deal.
Greenwelly, I’m not talking about operator profit here, i’m talking about opportunity cost. If you want to look at it that way then the end cost of this car park is $20,000 a week (paid by the consumers), which would buy even more bus passes!
In economic terms there is not production here, no actual profit for the economy. Transport doesn’t create economic productivity, it only allows people to be economically productive. But if the cost of providing transport is too high then there net gain is negligible.
Based on your figures it is a cost of around a million dollars a year to store 400 vehicles, and this is all effectively money down the drain. There might be a profit on the books of the DHB but the lions share of the money simply goes into the cost of building and servicing the structure.
Big problem with this is that parking doesn’t constitute a fringe benefit for tax purposes but providing cash-in-hand would be taxable income for the employee and providing public transport passes would attract FBT for the employer.
One quick way to increase tax income, reduce parking demand, and improve public transport usage would be to invert the relationship: have parking attract FBT if provided in an area with metered parking, and make employer-provided public transport passes tax-exempt (excluding GST). And if the employee wants to cash up their parking, then I see no problem with it being taxed as ordinary income since the carparking was probably part of their remuneration anyway.
Salary packaging (i.e. company supplies the card and takes the cost from the employees pre-tax income ) of public transport passes is very common here in Melbourne. This means that you can get a pass valid for a year across all services in the city for a cut in after-tax income of around $30 a fortnight.
Same thing could happen here, but the cost is much higher and the employer probably wouldn’t want to wear the administrative costs, especially since public transport is still not totally accepted as a mainstream travel modality.
Fundamentally there is one thing that has to go with these sort of policies, decent public transport and not just to and from the CBD as it is now.
I know my brother used to work for a company in the Auckland CBD that just gave every employee the after tax amount it would cost to park in the parking building across the street 5 days a week for the year in their salary and if parking went up so did the money. It sat outside of their salary. I would imagine this could be implemented fairly easily at most companies and if you take PT you’d get to pocket plenty of cash. For the record he generally walked the approx 3km to work most days.
Its a bit of a chicken and egg scenario penfold. If you don’t restrict parking then there won’t be a demand for public transport. Conversely, there is no will to provide public transport if there is lots of free parking around.
You have to pick one to go ahead of the other and I think it has to be parking restriction first to build up the demand for public transport. Worst case scenario you get a lot of people parking in the street or having to pay for parking in commercial parking buildings. That’s not much different from the scenario in most inner city suburbs now.