Auckland Transport put out quite a weird press release late last week, highlighting that the point of their $14 million carpark at Manukau City is to “free up land”.
A new multi-storey car park building about to be built in Manukau will provide 680 parking spaces and free up valuable land in the city centre for future development.
The $14 million project, which Auckland Transport inherited from the former Manukau City Council, is located on the corner of Davies and Ronwood Avenues.
Auckland Transport will begin construction work in June and it is expected to be completed by April 2012.
I can potentially see the justification that Manukau is dominated by surface parking, so putting a lot of that surface parking together into one structure would limit the domination of Manukau City by asphalt. But that only rings true if the parking building replaces surface level parking. Judging by comments later in the media release it seems that the real point of the carpark is to provide additional spaces – not to free up development lots at all:
Auckland Transport Manager Major Projects Rick Walden says providing parking on this site fits with the future plans of the city centre (my underlining).
“The lack of parking for businesses has been a problem for many years and is constraining development in the city centre. The vast majority of parking in Manukau city centre is short term for the Westfield shopping centre.
“The car park is in a strategic location and future development of the site will attract a mixed use of commercial and retail business to the area.
“It will also free up ground level land currently leased for parking, allowing the sites to be developed.
“It will also keep established businesses in the city centre and meet parking demands for their customers and staff. The new tertiary campus, Manukau rail link and workers in the area too will benefit,” says Mr Walden.
I struggle to see how parking will benefit the rail link – particularly as at the end of the media release Mr Walden says that Park and Ride options are still being looked at, which makes one think that this building won’t include provision for park and ride (at least not specifically). I also struggle to believe that Manukau has a lack of parking. Looking at an aerial of the place it seems like there’s little but parking.
There’s plenty of parking in Manukau – if you look closely at the aerial photographs above you’ll see that vast swathes of parking spaces are empty (the photos were taken on a Sunday) – there’s no reason why the Westfield carpark couldn’t be much smaller but use all this empty space on the weekends, with office workers have a reciprocal ability to use the under-used Westfield carpark during the week.
The problem with Manukau is how it has been designed – with the car clearly front and centre in its layout, and everyone else (including public transport) relegated to second class citizens. This has meant that everyone feels like they need to drive to get to Manukau, while the owners of shopping centres and office blocks also feel that they need to provide as much parking as possible in order for their developments to be successful. After all, the more cars you can accommodate, the more people you’ll draw in – so the thinking goes.
This is a tough cycle to break, once established. As I noted in this previous post – the ultimate endpoint for the type of development being envisaged in Manukau City is Tysons Corner – near Washington DC. I don’t think this is what we should be aiming for:
Ultimately, the fact that Auckland Transport feel that they need to waste $14 million on a carpark in a town centre that will compete with the brand new train station they’re building is a classic example of why auto-dependency is stupid. So much space is taken up by parking, yet the hostility of the place to pedestrians and public transport users means that this is never enough – as you simply have to drive to Manukau if you want to visit there. Developers recognise this, and therefore try to either provide as much parking as they can or (in this case) somehow manage to convince a public agency into spending $14 million to support them. This is a never-ending cycle that I believe can only be broken by significant improvements in public transport and a dramatic redesign of how Manukau City works. Even then it will probably take decades to fix up the mess this area has become.
However, I’m sure a good start could be made on that with $14 million.
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Does the council even own any of the land that is currently used for parking? If not then claiming their development into more than carparks is dependent on this carparking buildngs rings pretty hollow seeing as any future development will be required to provide even more parking…..this development really is having your cake and eating it too.
Looking at a map is even more revealing as this carpark is actually nowhere near the train station so will be of dubious use for park and ride users.
Manukau and Tyson’s Corner are really examples of the underuse of carparking more than anything else. Each development is forced to put in carparking to meet the peak demand. Most of the time these businesses are nowhere near reaching these demand levels so you are left with huge amounts of land being used to park a few cars in for much of the time. It would be interesting to look at Manukau as a whole and add up how many carparks are actually in use at any one time. Then build one or more buildings to cater for that demand. I would be my left one that the actual carpark use rather than the theoretical peak time use would be much lower and would enable much better land use decisions to be made. This also highlights the importance of mixed development. In the past we have designated areas for specific needs, this is the shopping mall, over there are the offices and that area there is for residential. If you have a mixed development it allows resources that would otherwise go to waste (shopping mall carparks) to be used by others (offices during the day and residents at night).
This is off topic but I’m struggling to find the sources of funding for the NLTF. The AA say car drivers pay disproportionally, the RTF argue that truckers do. It matters especially as Joyce’s rush for a new [road] harbour crossing is based on an argument around the current bridge not being able to take the heavy trucks that he has just authourised. Point out that traffic is failing on the bridge and it is argued that is irrelevant because it is only light vehicle numbers that are falling. True, but how reasonable is it for the super heavy sector to drive all policy? Especially as there are are other routes north. There is well over 100 years in the current bridge so long as super heavy vehicles are kept off it. Surely the most cost effective way forward then is to revert to the previous weight limit, at least on the bridge, or indeed everywhere if we wish to reduce damage to the network. Really shouldn’t these big cargos really be on the rail network?
So my question really is how much reasonable claim do the heavy vehicle users have on the fund, what proportion? Anyone have any suggestions?
MCC only owned a small portion of the total area of parking, most of which was used by council officers and some of it leased to other businesses. The vast majority of parking belongs to Westfield and they are all on 120-240min restrictions. Westfield even has a section of two story parking. Your car gets towed or clamped very promptly if it is there longer than those times. During working hours the carparks are very under utilised, possibly less than 50%. Only on late night shopping nights and the weekends does Westfield need all their parks, which is why I don’t understand why they are so vigilant in enforcing these restrictions.
Not sure what tags work here, but here is a map of the car parking.
[img]http://oi56.tinypic.com/71pkya.jpg[/img]
Those car yards need to go eventually.
And apparently we need to extend the city limits because there isn’t enough land inside the limits for the development needed to house and work the population…
Why aren’t they building it closer to the currently being constructed train station?