by frog
Most of us probably don’t feel that way when we’re paying for it. But there’s an interesting interview on Breakfast TV between a transport planner and Pippa Wetzell which might make you think again…
And more food for thought. Here’s a diagram prepared by alert blogger and planner Joshua Arbury showing how much land (the grey parts) in Manukau’s City Centre is being used for parking or roads.
The solution? Well, it’s a complex problem. But a good start would be to get rid of the minimum car parking requirements councils impose on new buildings (you can see an example of the requirements for the Auckland isthmus here).
Because all the existing parking would remain there wouldn’t be a dramatic “crunch” in which cars piled up around the city. But it would free up a lot of additional office/residential/retail space in new developments and encourage people to use more sustainable forms of transport to get around.
Right now, the cost of providing those carparks is absorbed by the developers. They then pass it on to the businesses who buy their buildings. And the businesses then recoup that cost from their customers by charging slightly more for good and services (e.g., a mall might charge slightly more for clothes to cover the cost of the mortgage it’s paying on its carparks). The problem is that everybody pays that cost – not just those who drive to the mall and use the carparks.
And, of course, we all pay the cost of having reduced land available for productive purposes (e.g., businesses, houses etc) in the form of higher property prices.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Tue, December 15th, 2009
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
As someone who lives an hour beyond the nearest city boundary, all that parking comes in handy. Still, the system in Melbourne where you can drive to any edge of the city (or the edge of any city within), park at a train station, and connect from there to the trams that run ’round the shopping districts and sports venues is vastly more convenient, and cheap to use too.
Large car-free malls in the centre of smaller towns in Vic also work well, park at the edge and everything is within a couple blocks.
But, of course, they pay for all that too. It just depends what’s cheaper. 8]
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Saw it live, and wanted to throw a brick at the telly, and all before work
It wasn’t an interesting interview; it was an awful interview, had Henry conducted it it might have been a bit more interesting. Actually, that may be a bit unfair; it started to get interesting after the interview, and I’ll wager that the replay version doesn’t have the Henry’s opinions.
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“Free” parking costs in the following ways:
1) Wages are reduced, employers are required to provide a certain number of parking spaces for employees, the cost to develop, maintain and rate these parks is taken from wages…
2). Goods are more expensive, a business is required to provide parks for it’s shoppers, for example a movie cinema is required to have 1 park for every three persons it is capable of accomodating, the cost to develop, maintain and rate these parks is passed onto the customer…
3). Housing is more expensive, the cost of the extra land and the cost to develop the parks is added to the purchase price, maintaining and rating the parks is an ongoing cost to the homeowner…
By internalising these costs it means no one is allowed to choose whether they would rather buy a cheaper house without a carpark and live a car free life, with access to cheaper goods from a store with no car parking or a job with no car park and higher wages, they are paying for the parking use indirectly anyway so why would they not drive, the true cost of a car dependent city is hidden by this internalisation…
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Is it me or did frog just call for a market solution to a problem?
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Actually frog, if it was only the red areas in that diagram that were parking then it wouldn’t be nearly so bad. The real problem is that all the grey areas are roads or parking. At a guess that would be around 75% of Manukau City Centre.
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Sorry Jarbury. I accidentally put in the wrong colour. Have updated post.
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I always smell a rat when people say things like “we all pay for the minimum parking requirements because the this and then the that and whtsit happens and you end up paying”. It is a long chain of reasoning and any one of the links, on close examination, could turn out to be quite weak.
I have been living without a car for quite some time now, partly as an experiment to see what is and is not possible. There is no question that it is cheaper not to have a car (I hire one occasionally, even including those costs) and I have a lower standard of living for it.
SO, I conclude, being Green and all, cars are fantastic. Even when I had a car I hated driving to work, I always used public transport if I could (had to give up trains in Auckland – one caught fire and another had a bit of tunnel come through a window – twice bitten, not waiting for the third!)
I really want the car for shopping. I am so sick of carrying 20kgs of groceries on the bus twice a week. (I live 700 meters horizontally and ~50 meters vertically from the super market)
Currently, in my spare room, is a bike box waiting for when I get access to a car to return it to the shop. If I had a car that resource would not be going to waste.
I do not know what the answer is to the polluting nature of private transport (or public transport – the 40 tonne (?) buses in my neck of the woods normally have only a handful of passengers mostly – much more wastful of resources than if we all drove little cars).
But I do know that cars vastly improve our standard of living. When I hear childless 20-somethings lecturing me about how we should not be using cars steam comes out my ears. Wait till they have teenage children to organise. I am living that life now, and in the new year I think I’ll get a car!
Lastly the “price signals” people talk of (parking charges and congestion charges) mean “let the rich have access and deny the poor”. People, there are other ways.
peace (just)
W
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I am so sick of carrying 20kgs of groceries on the bus twice a week.
Is something like Cityhop (google it) viable for you?
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Bliss said:
I always smell a rat when people say things like “we all pay for the minimum parking requirements because the this and then the that and whtsit happens and you end up paying”.
I’m guessing that was directed at me Bliss..? What part of what I said do you believe doesn’t hold up to scrutiny..?
Isn’t it a simple concept, if the council requires everyone to pay for car based infrastructue those that don’t use cars are subsidising others..?
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Well, not being a childless 20-something, I can relate to what Bliss says about children and cars, but in Wellington at least it is still easier to use buses, feet and taxis for most things. Grocery shopping is easier (and less stressful I find) to do if one uses feet to get to the supermarket and taxi to get home. No need to worry about parking either
. Another advantage is that the kids are much less stressed in the supermarket if they walk there.
Teenagers need to get used to doing things on their own as well. Although again if the city culture assumes everyone has a car then that is harder than in a city where that is not the case.
I have lived car-free and car-ful lives. Living car-free is definitely cheaper, even allowing for taxis and rentals. If you can share a car with several people that effect is magnified compared with single person ownership. And quality of life – well I know the more I walk, the happier and healthier I am – and that makes me a better parent as well.
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I just remembered that I did a similar exercise in the 1990s for Wellington’s Inner-City (within the town belt). At that time, around 25-27% of inner-city land was devoted to roads and parking, rising to over 30% if one included car yards. This visual mapping shows how land hungry car-dependence is. The costs of having land tied up in parking is significant.
It would be much better to require developments to have certain proportion of sales despatched via home delivery services – imagine how your local mall would respond if each car park had a $5/day charge levied by the regional council and the mall as a whole had to demonstrate that 25% of sales by volume and value were delivered via home delivery services.
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Jezza
Not really directed at you. But at long chains of economic reasoning generally. We know how surprising and counter intuitive economics results are.
But let’s look….
Taken from wages? How do you know? In industries where labour is cheap and plentiful there may be room to lower wages to pay for car parks, but in those circumstances wages are probably set at subsistence level anyway.
There are plenty of other places the money could have come from:
* Lower profits (the wages of cvapital)
* Less rent paid for building
* More rent paid for building
Additionally you do not have any idea what the land would be used for if not car parks. Why assume it would be put to productive use? If so why did the designers of the building not put the car parks *under* the building?
Pretty much the same counter arguments apply to this chain. The price of goods are set in complex relationships. You cannot take one element and say “if you put this up that will go up”. Economic relationships are not linear as you imply.
Snipped the housing argument – more of the same. The arguments are only valid if you assume linear relationships between the prices of goods and services.
There is no question that there are tradeoffs around the economic decisions of car ownership and the design of cities. It is also true that the design of our cities is pitiful. My point is saying “you get paid less” or “you pay more for the cinema” because of car parking rules is based on assumptions. It could just as easily be true that less profit is made because of car parking rules.
The same arguments apply to safety rues, holidays, public health care and any number of things you could think of.
Probably in some ways our standard of living is reduced by the costs associated with planning for cars. But those same cars improve our standard of living too.
It is absolutely true that better and more efficient public transport would improve our life styles too. (Safe reliable trains, for instance!) But the anti-car stuff that comes from some of my fellow greens is simply off putting to people who like the freedom that cars bring.
peace
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