As I’ve written before, car parking doesn’t come cheap for apartments and terraces. Typically, car parks in a basement or building will cost around $30,000 to $50,000 each to provide. This can make a big difference to the overall cost of an apartment, something often overlooked in the debate about affordable housing.
For this reason and many others, we’ve consistently advocated for the removal of parking minimums. That’s the preferred policy approach. We also push for more frequent, more reliable, and more connected public and active transport options, so people have choices besides driving.
However, the private sector has a role to play too. Most of the developments we’re tracking around Auckland have one or two carparks bundled with each apartment. The cost of that park is factored into the overall sale price. What we’d like to see is more developments “unbundling” their carparks, selling them separately to the apartments. Buyers will still be able to purchase them, but if the $40,000 price tag makes them reevaluate how much they need a carpark, they won’t have to (what are you doing parking your $5,000 car in a $40,000 carpark anyway?). As a result, the developer gets a better gauge of the demand for carparks – one which matches the demand to the actual cost of providing them – and can potentially build fewer of them.
We expect to see a lot more bike racks in new developments – these are often mandatory anyway – and we’re starting to see some encouraging signs that developers are innovating and coming up with new ideas for helping apartment residents get around the city.
This was well covered in a Herald article earlier this week:
Free Primavera 50 Vespa motor scooters and helmets are being given away with six “affordable” Mt Eden one-bedroom apartments, for sale from $430,000.
Greg Reidy, managing director of developer McDougall Reidy, said the scooter and helmet idea was for buyers of the smaller places in his Botanica Living scheme because they have no carparks.
Although the new apartment block will rise near the Mt Eden Train Station, Reidy said the Vespa idea was an attempt to resolve transport and commuting issues for buyers.
“They cost about $6000 each. We thought it was an option for people to get around the city without using a car. I think it’s a good solution. You see it all around the world, in places like Rome, people buzzing around on those,” Reidy said.
Two free electric cars come with another big apartment scheme where residents will each be issued with keys and must then decide who gets to use the cars and when.
Mark Todd of developers Ockham Residential described the electric car scheme for a high-profile block planned on Akepiro St, Mt Eden.
“We will be building 33 apartments this coming spring with just two communal electric cars. There will also be cycle and motorcycle parking”.
OK, so most Botanica apartments still come bundled with carparks, but so do almost all the others in Auckland, especially outside the city centre. Scooters are a good option for people who still need to drive occasionally (and who’d only be taking up one seat in a five seat car anyway…), so this is an innovative idea from the developer. Scooters are cheap, fuel efficient, and take up a lot less space in the basement than cars, so the parks cost a lot less to provide.
As for Akepiro St, which I’m told will be called the Daisy apartments, this is pioneering stuff for New Zealand in many ways – transport is just one of them. Based on the article, it seems they’ve gone from 25 to 33 apartments since the design competition for the building finished, and from 11 to 2 carparks, both of which are communal. It’s a well connected site, close to both train and bus routes, and pretty central for people who want to use active modes. I’m sure there’ll be a number of companies keen to give Ockham a good deal on the electric cars, too.
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scooter without dedicated lane is very dangerous
Scooters and motorcycles are more dangerous than driving a car, sure. That’s reflected (in part) in their higher ACC levies. But scooters are also likely to be used on local roads, not motorways, and for pretty short trips in an urban setting. Hopefully, that means they’ll be away from higher speed, higher risk situations.
Safety is just one of many considerations, and one we can hopefully improve on by encouraging people driving larger vehicles to be more spatially aware!
Motorcycles are not dangerous, in the right hands they are inherently stable and very safe. It’s the rider that is dangerous. By far the highest rate af injuries is on the open road on bends where no other vehicle is involved and it’s never the motorcycles fault.
This looks awesome.
> We expect to see a lot more bike racks in new developments – these are often mandatory anyway
Seeing the gradual introduction of bicycle parking mandates kind of makes me appreciate how we ended up with parking minimums in the first place. There’s a type of vehicle that’s booming in popularity, nowhere to store it, and the market doesn’t seem to be coming up with a better solution than “dump it on the street”.
It’s kind of changed my mind to actually support a minimal level of car parking to be required in developments, at least for pickup/dropoff, loading/unloading, disabled parks, and visitors. (And it could well be on-street parking). Every building requires at least occasional access by motor vehicle, and developers are canny, cheap bastards who’ll cut any corner they can.
Valid points – if a bit harsh on developers! The thing is, it’s hard for parking minimums to regulate all the things you mention. Should every apartment building have a dropoff/ loading zone? Doesn’t on-street parking (especially with time restrictions or appropriate signage) do a pretty good job of that, especially given that you’d presumably only need a small fraction of a park for each apartment? Disabled parks are tricky too. Although there are disability access requirements, so the carpark areas would be accessible by lift etc, it’s hard to come up with a workable way of requiring larger, disabled-friendly carparks within apartment buildings. Easier if the carparks are unbundled, but otherwise what do you do? Have a couple of larger parks, and the body corp requests that if the owner doesn’t have disabilities but there’s someone else in the building who does, they switch?
Visitor parking is another issue. It’s great to have, but since it’s unpriced there’s no way of controlling the demand. Sometimes too many cars want to use it, and much of the time it’s empty. I’d suggest the best solution is appropriately priced street/ parking building parks nearby.
Moving house, getting new furniture etc can be tricky when you’re in an apartment – I’ve just moved recently myself – and it’s trickier when you don’t have a carpark, or when there isn’t somewhere you can park a car and trailer out front say, but is this something we should regulate?
Yes, I think generally on-street parking (or frequent small local parking lots, as they have in Japan) is a great way to solve issues like this. Particularly since it can be shared between buildings, or reallocated between various disabled parks, loading zones, time-limited parks etc. as a neighbourhood changes. It baffles me how many of our Urbanist set are against flexible parking like this.
That said, council often does a terrible job of managing on-street parking. Loading zones and pick-up/drop-off zones in general are woefully lacking in Auckland. Great North Road in Arch Hill really needs a loading zone for those car delivery trucks, for example, but apparently having four empty lanes even off-peak is more important.
On street parking should be used smartly but shouldn’t be specifically allocated to apartment users. It is irresponsible for a developer to create a building with no loading zone in my opinion – for furniture deliveries, moving home, renovations etc; going forward, food deliveries, drycleaning pick up, etc.
Not, it shouldn’t be allocated to specific buildings, but realistically a loading zone is only going to be used for loading by people with business really close nearby. I’d say whether an apartment building needs its own loading zone depends on size. A 200-unit building definitely needs one, a 5-unit building probably doesn’t, if there’s enough capacity on-street.
I was assuming 40 units plus like those referred to in the article. Agree for a 5 unit place, not necessary.
Suppose someone is building your business, and your customers come by car and need parking (*). Also assume they expect free parking. But for the small amount of parking he needs, there’s no real practical way to enforce only your customers use it.
If there is currently a parking shortage in the area, building your own car parks is not going to help because often other people who are not your customers will occupy it.
If there’s enough parking, building a few more spaces is not going to make a big difference. Your customers will be able to find parking nearby.
The business bears the full cost of providing parking, but the benefits are spread over all the businesses in the nearby area. So for each individual it makes sense to not provide his own parking. But for everyone together of course that will result in a parking shortage. Probably someone who knows game theory has a good explanation of how this situation works.
I guess parking minimums are a way to deal with this situation.
(*) At least in Albany this assumption appears to be true. The lack of pedestrian shortcuts between the streets prevents most people living around Albany Village to walk to the village.
> Also assume they expect free parking. But for the small amount of parking he needs, there’s no real practical way to enforce only your customers use it.
People expect free parking in areas where most parking is free. No-one expects unrestricted free parking in, say, Newmarket, and so there isn’t any. 277 and The Warehouse both offer free parking for paying customers, in lots that are otherwise paid.
> The business bears the full cost of providing parking, but the benefits are spread over all the businesses in the nearby area.
Well, the obvious solution is to recover the cost of providing parking, as well. If there’s a shortage of parking, it’s obviously a popular area, and you’ll be able to make a buck charging for it. I think expecting to park anywhere in a built-up urban area for free is silly. There needs to be parking, but there’s no reason it needs to be “free”.
I agree, but currently charging for car parks probably would only recover part of the investment anyway. So it doesn’t really change the situation. The 277 in Newmarket has a large car park, making it worthwhile to invest in a ticket machine and access gate etc. but for a small business that’s not practical.
Even in Newmarket a lot of businesses have some free parking for customers somewhere in the back.
I guess the free on-street parking was first, and then all the annoyed people not finding a car park came next.
And then for every individual business the best play would be still relying on on-street parking, and hoping the rest actually provides parking.
This kind of situation is common in game theory, similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. Other examples are most debates about limiting pollution, or, in the absence of bus lanes, individuals choosing between the car (faster for the individual) or the bus (less congestion for everybody) to go to work.
Adopting parking minimums was probably not the most fortunate move to beat this game. But it’s an understandable move on the height of the car/freedom dream.
> But it’s an understandable move on the height of the car/freedom dream.
Oh yeah, that’s what I was saying, it was the most natural thing in the world, just as bicycle parking requirements are a natural progression from where we are in 2015.
> Not bothering to count subsidies and consider whether or not they are reasonable is a cop out.
It’s reasonable to consider whether transport as a whole is subsidised, but it’s impossible and pointless to decide that one mode of transport is more or less subsidised than another. They all do different jobs and require different things from government. You consider the overall costs and benefits of one approach versus another, but knee-jerk reactions are shitty policy – like insisting that PT is worthless unless it has 100% farebox recovery.
I would envision the future lies around electric uni cycles and segway type elecric personal transporter
My problem with bike racks and apartment developers was that they almost always did it on the absolute cheap, and the bike racks were installed so they were insecure with public or almost public access. I did see a couple of buildings in the CBD with a locked bike room with CCTV – that’s how it’s should be done. Electric unicycles are fantastic too, and don’t require all that space, but I think that providing secure cycle space is still important.
Great concept but it will all be in the execution. I do wonder if the shared car scheme will become a burden on the bodycorp. I wonder if they will outsource to the likes of CityHop.
No harder than for any other business with shared cars? My company has two cars, we book them through Outlook and our receptionist takes care of the WOFs, maintenance, cleaning etc. I’d imagine the building manager would be responsible for this kind of thing, with a shared Google Calendar or similar for residents to book the cars. I’m sure you’d get the odd messup with someone taking the car without booking it, and someone else needing to take a taxi at short notice, but not the end of the world.
As you say, it’d certainly be possible to outsource, to CityHop or a new EV car sharing operator, if they can do a better job.
I been in a body corp meeting when they discussed a new running machine vs free weights – imagine the issues with cars! Plus not all complexes have live in managers for the key hand over etc. Just something for a buyer to be aware of – it may sound great but the devil is in the detail.
I believe that’s about to happen in one of the Hobsonville apartment buildings.
Would make more sense to simply rent the carparks or provide them free of charge (for a discount) to a car-share company, many apartment blocks in US cities did just that with ZipCar. Meant that when the cars in your building were in use there were plenty of others around.
Why build out when you can build up? The Japanese and the Germans have some interesting stacking systems for car parks that leave a small footprint. One drawback would be ensuring maintenance is up to scratch, though. http://www.nihonsun.com/2009/06/17/precarious-parking-options-in-japan/ http://www.woehr.de/en/multiparker.html
Stackers are all well and good, and I’m sure there’ll be more of them in the future (there are already a couple around Auckland). But based on the numbers I’ve seen, they don’t actually make a big difference to the cost. You don’t need to dig as big a basement, but the stacking machinery is quite pricey. This may change as the tech becomes more widespread.
Ironbank and Geyser Parnell have large automated car stackers. There are pros and cons to these systems for the devolpers to weigh up. Typically lower footprint & civil works cost combined with much higher mechanical equipment and maintenance costs. Momentum on college hill has manual dependent car stackers on every space on the upper parking deck. These come in quite cheap, and can be a good deal cheaply turn 1 car park into 2 (for the same apartment/business) if you can work enough head room into the design.
So a couple buy the apartment without the carpark(s). Then they leave their cars on the streets and in public carparks
Or perhaps they don’t even own a car (I live in the city, in an apartment block with no parking). At worse it’s no different than what currently happens all over Auckland in houses with no off street parking.
If I want a parking space I’d simply rent one in a nearby parking building, or pay for on-street.
So… No different to somebody living in an apartment with one car park, but owning three cars. Fairly common if in a flatting situation. Two cars will simply have to park elsewhere. As long as the other parking is prices such that peak occupancy says below 80-90% this is unlikely to cause issues.
I agree with unbundling. I would love to buy a carpark in a building in the CBD but I have no interest in the apartment they want me to buy to get it.
There are plenty on the market so go buy one. There are also more than enough buildings that have been built sans apartment all parking.
Check out trade embargo. Always a few car parks on there. I think some car parks require you to have an apartment or commercial premise in the building so you have a swipe card allready, but a some don’t have any such requirement. Some are super expensive though. I remember one in the metropolis building being listed for around $100k (next to the elevators…)
Check out trademe* -sorry autocorrect error
So… No different to somebody living in an apartment with one car park, but owning three cars. Fairly common if in a flatting situation. Two cars will simply have to park elsewhere. As long as the other parking is prices such that peak occupancy says below 80-90% this is unlikely to cause issues.
We are in an apartment building with no parking and we have a car. Not a major problem. Parking on the road generally frees up about 8pm so that is when you move stuff in or out. Otherwise the car lives in a commercial building down the road. Some residents have bought or are renting parks in the new apartment blocks nearby. They are quite expensive to buy, so I would think a developer would be keen to include a fair number in any new development whether or not it was a requirement – ie why not leave it to the market.
Auto dependency/sprawl advocates are only happy to trust the market when they are sure it will give them the outcome they want.
Which is why they dislike urban containment but like density controls and minimum parking.
Pro urban advocates are happy to accept the market’s preference in my experience.
“Pro urban advocates are happy to accept the market’s preference in my experience.” Unless that preference is for suburban single-family homes and “car dependency”, of course.
But this blog for example calls for an equal playing field up and out and equal funding for PT and roads – how is that not the market? Driving is as subsidised as PT so there is no market preference there. People will use whatever works best to get around.
Can you give an example of place with a level playing field on density vs sprawl where there has been no growth in density and the city has sprawled?
Please don’t say Houston. Houston has lots of density controls outside the central area, just no zoning – not the same thing.
As long as your preferences are properly priced, I don’t care what you do. If you’re willing to pay the costs of your location choices, such as the cost of building expensive new roads to fringe suburbs, go ahead and live where you like.
At present, it doesn’t work like this. We don’t have congestion charging to ration peak demands on transport networks; we have development contributions that don’t correlate well to location-specific infrastructure costs; we use public money to build motorways that couldn’t pay their own way if they were tolled. Hence the need for different transport policies.
Transportblog’s authors, who include three professional economists (John, Stu and I), understand this principle pretty well.
Sweet, let me know where there is a free market without planning controls where people could chose between building a standalone house, or a terrace, or block of flats, or a tower… so we can observe the response.
Hang on, only place you have a free market for property development is in the CBD… I must have missed the suburbs of McMansions downtown.
“But this blog for example calls for an equal playing field up and out and equal funding for PT and roads – how is that not the market? Driving is as subsidised as PT so there is no market preference there. People will use whatever works best to get around.”
Is driving really as subsidised as PT? Road users pay for all state highways and half the cost of local roads. There is certainly cross subsidisation between road users, but that is not really the same thing.
A level playing field is certainly consistent with the idea of a free market, but equal funding for PT and roads (particularly given the source of the funding is largely from road users), is not anyones definition of a free market.
“At present, it doesn’t work like this. We don’t have congestion charging to ration peak demands on transport networks; we have development contributions that don’t correlate well to location-specific infrastructure costs; we use public money to build motorways that couldn’t pay their own way if they were tolled. Hence the need for different transport policies.”
Surely it should be “Hence the need to address distortions”. Using market distortions as a justification for trying deliberately screwing it back the other way is interesting. Not sure how valid this is – how does anyone know what the world would look like in the absence of the distortions, and is that what we are aiming for? There was a discussion on here recently around the “costs” associated with sprawl. It was being advocated (by one of the professional economists), that the total net cost of people choosing sprawl on the health system should be considered in regulating the market. I pointed out this is quite different from ensuring that outcomes are as close to what they would be in an undistorted system, as peoples preference for sprawl may mean such costs are inframarginal and wouldnth have affected their behaviour. If you are proposing that regulatory intervention is justified because the market is distorted, you still have a high bar to cross before they can be justified.
Auckland has heavily invested in infrastructure for driving over the last 60 years, rather than public transport. That puts PT in a rather unfair starting point, in terms of looking at the system today and saying what pays its way more. If we had better PT infrastructure, we could have much lower costs per passenger km, or whatever metric is preferred. We’ll head that way over the next few years, because we’re now investing, redesigning the network for better efficiency, making it easier to transfer and so on.
Also note that the bit about “road users pay for all state highways and half the cost of local roads” has only been true for a few short years, since the last Labour government hypothecated road funding. And it’s much less true now, with National having invested heavily on RoNS and $800 million of Auckland roading projects, with a big chunk of that money coming from other sources than fuel excise and RUCs.
For Auckland, we face a growing population and need to consider the best way of providing for increased demands for transport.
We’re now at the point where most of these roading projects have lousy benefit cost ratios, won’t hope to ever cover their costs through raising additional excise and RUCs, and where investment in public transport can have much greater benefits.
Subsidies are also a different argument from externalities. There are negative externalities from driving, including congestion (unpriced), and an Emissions Trading Scheme charge which arguably doesn’t reflect the true cost of those emissions – although it must also be said that even a hefty charge wouldn’t make a massive difference to fuel prices.
Well, at this point we can argue for ever about what counts as a subsidy.
Petrol tax pays for maintaining and building roads, but nothing for the vast amount of roads that already exist. Driving gets the lion’s share of publicly-owned space for free. Is having all that land rent-free a “subsidy”?
Parking minimums require developers, residents, and businesses to pay for parking, not drivers. Is that a “subsidy”?
New developments need to give lots of land to the government for free, for roads. Is that a “subsidy”?
Our road rules, street design, and council and NZTA policies prioritise car movement over pedestrians, cyclists, and public transport. Is that a “subsidy”? It’s certainly a distortion that cars practically always have right-of-way over other modes.
We have land-use regulations that require our cities to be built in a way that’s friendly for driving, unfriendly for walking, and completely ignores the fairly easy requirements that public transport needs to be effective. Is that a “subsidy”?
There seems to be this underlying idea that transport is a “market” and the government needs to just stay hands-off and see what “wins”. It’s ridiculous. Transport inevitably involves huge amounts of detailed planning, decision-making and funding by the government. Complaining that something is or is not subsidised is a waste of time. The question is: what are our goals for the transport system and how should we achieve them? We have to plan, one way or another, let’s not pretend that we’re not planning already. (For cars, mostly, at the moment).
@ Stephen Davis
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . +1
A large proportion of the money for Auckland’s local roads come from rates and general taxation. Maybe not a majority but a good minority.
However, you also need to consider that over half that money is used for maintenance. That maintenance is not caused by bicycles and certainly not trains. If only buses drove on the road the amount of damage would be minimal, especially as they tend to drive at low speeds.
On top of that, the complexity and cost of our current roading infrastructure is only necessary because of cars and trucks. If the roads only had to provide for buses, tram and cyclists, they could be much simpler and less expensive. Look at old videos of NZ cities before the 1960s and the simplicity of the roads – this is Chch in 1952:
https://youtu.be/p8PVvm71DPk
Altogether, there are huge subsidies for driving a car. There is no way all the externalities of driving are paid for.
Goosoid,
I am certainly not trying to argue roads are unsubsidised. I thought in your first comment that you were saying the level of subsidy is the same, which I am not sure is true.
John, so you are saying that roading is subsidised less than PT? Regarding improvements in the future. I suppose that might be true, its not clear that it is though. Bus lanes will certainly improve things for buses and the new network should as well Rail investment on the other hand seems likely to make things worse (including capex). Regarding hypothecation, it was my understanding that prior to hypothecation, roads got less spent on them than was collected. So hypothecation increased road spending. At the moment the goevernment is using other funding sources, but these are effectively loans that are to be repaid by the NLTF, so this is more of a move away from PAYGO than anything else. I agree some of the current roading projects have poor BCRs but that is another topic. Not sure what your point is about externalities, although granted if there are externalities we should be charging car owners, this should be changed. Yes our ETS is currently set too low so this would increase the cost of driving a bit.
Stephen, Yes minimum parking requirements are an effective subsidy, good point. These can be eliminated fairly easily and should be. Not really a justification for subsidising PT I wouldnt have thought, and hard to quanitfy this compared to PT subsidies. Regarding the costs of the real estate. I agree this is significant in heavily built up areas so may affect things slightly. But in general roads are a requirement to provide access to properties, and this is the main justification for part of local roads being paid via rates. I agree this is a subsidy though particularly for urban motorways (where the land was “gifted” by the crown), and for say the CBD.
While you cant have a perfect transport market, you can certainly make it a heck of a lot better than what it is currently. There is no reason we cant introduce market clearing road pricing and simultaneously eliminate PT subsidies. This (along with any externality costs you want to throw into the mix. Prioritisation for cars? You could argue this is a subsidy I suppose. I certainly think provision of cycle and ped infra out of road funds is well justified given the exclusionary nature of road transport for these modes. But that is a bit different to PT.
Matthew,
I think you’re missing my point: you can argue either way about whether any of those things are “subsidies” that distort some sort of mythical “free market” or not. I think it’s pointless to even try: transport, by it’s very nature, is inevitably centrally planned by the government. If PT fares are less than operating expenses, it’s no more meaningful to call that a “subsidy” than to say that state-funded primary schools are a “subsidy” for children.
I certainly disagree with your point. Not bothering to count subsidies and consider whether or not they are reasonable is a cop out. I believe in consumer sovereignty as a guiding principle.
This is an interesting discussion so hopefully there are some others that are still reading! Matthew, I haven’t really got a position on which is subsidised more out of roads or PT. I think it’s the wrong question to ask. The point about externalities is that there are things about driving that aren’t priced. The direct way to tackle those (at least the largest one, being congestion) would be road pricing, but we don’t do that. We subsidise public transport, in part, because it helps to counter the negative externalities of driving.
Trains are certainly more expensive than other modes, but there’s also an Auckland study which suggests that they’ve had larger decongestion benefits, which is in the same sort of range as their higher subsidy. That study will now be out of date; with growing patronage and the switch to electrics, subsidies per passenger km are continuing to fall. On the other hand, trains are being used for more purposes besides just peak commuting, so maybe the typical passenger is now making less impact on congestion.
The CRL will change the playing field for trains again, and Stu’s rough estimates have suggested that it could be revenue neutral operationally, thereby cutting subsidy per passenger still further. http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/2013/10/07/the-financial-impacts-of-the-crl/
Then there are things we haven’t considered so far – the fact that the CRL lets the city centre keep growing, that investing in PT and active transport modes will mean people may need to buy fewer cars, with all the other expenses those entail, etc. It’s not possible to encapsulate all that in a simple subsidy question.