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Parking

By Ross Elliott - posted Wednesday, 9 July 2014


The problem is simple: if you take the cars out of the city, you'll take the people too. And then the businesses will follow.

Bear in mind that parking is not just about commuters. CBDs and inner cities are places for business to interact with other businesses, and with government. They also interact with customers, clients and suppliers. They have restaurants and retail shops that rely not just on the CBD worker but also visitors to the CBD, for the retail dollar. Many of these people invariably rely on the private vehicle to get there. Casual parking costs – at up to $55 for a couple of hours – have long passed the point where they're a deterrent: they're a real disincentive to visit the CBD for casual business meetings. Permanent parkers with paid company spaces won't notice this. But they may begin to wonder at the number of meeting requests for out-of-centre meetings, where the parking cost isn't ten times the cost of the coffee.

If the intent is to 'punish' the private vehicle in the belief that this will encourage higher rates of public transit patronage, the irony is that the consequence could see more businesses relocate to outside city centres, where parking regimes are more favourable and occupancy costs lower. If that happens, the numbers of office workers for whom train and bus services are a convenient option will actually fall – because public transport options in non-central locations are notoriously difficult to service and often require mode or route changes for a single trip.

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Centralised employment is what works for public transport so it ought to be in the interests of public transport advocates to support more CBD employment and more widely available parking (both in supply and pricing) than to argue for punitive agenda-based policy positions which may deter businesses from city centres. In short, if you succeed in chasing cars out of the inner city, you may also chase business out and end up with more private vehicle transit for work journeys than if they had stayed in the CBD.

The reality too is that public transport will only go so far. In Australian cities, the highest patronage of public transport by CBD workers is by people who live close to the city in the first place. Travel beyond a 5 klm or 10 klm ring and the mode share by public transport drops quickly to below 10% (see here for an excellent analysis).

The reason is that – contrary to popular opinion – only around 10% to 15% of metro wide jobs are in the CBD and inner city. If you have a CBD job, you tend to earn more, and will want to live closer to your work. Ironically, this makes you also more likely to take advantage of very generous taxpayer subsidies for your train or bus fare to work, than the suburban worker who gets no such subsidy for commuting by private car to their lower paid job in a suburban location. And because most employment is distributed throughout suburban locations of our metropolitan areas, these are always going to be more suited to private vehicles than public transport.

To get our public transport usage up to even half the rate of somewhere like New York – where 55% of commuters use public transport - we would need to see employment concentration in our CBDs quadruple to 40% of metro wide jobs while suburban employment didn't grow at all.

Hardly even a remote possibility.

On the demand side, we seem to have a capacity to pay when it comes to parking that is allowing operators to charge what they do. However expensive the spaces may be, they do seem consistently full. Arguably, for many there is little choice. There is also little competition, with only a couple of operators seemingly controlling the market. But it is fair to question whether the exorbitant rates now being charged – especially for short term parking – won't in time begin to change behaviour. If that behaviour begins to lead an exodus of activity to non-central locations, prices should fall as demand weakens. But that may create other, larger problems as suggested above.

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So how should we deal with congestion and parking policy and public transport?

There is no easy answer here but I'd suggest that reliance on proven failures like parking taxes or similar pricing policies in the Australian context is not a good option. It might be helpful instead to get a solid grasp on all the factors driving the high cost of parking – including oligopoly pricing by a small handful of operators.

We also need to understand clearly the benefits of city parking before treating it like a disease and trying to eradicate it, or the patient will suffer. And we also need to be very clear on what alternatives exist and the genuine likelihood and extent to which public transport can replace the private vehicle, given our urban scale and the nature of our urban economies.

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This article was first published on The Pulse.



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About the Author

Ross Elliott is an industry consultant and business advisor, currently working with property economists Macroplan and engineers Calibre, among others.

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