Taylor Swift may have now departed Australia in her private jet, but her fans have inadvertently kicked off a debate about a very different kind of transport.
Swift’s record-breaking tour saw social media flooded with videos of the sheer scale of the crowds piling in and out of Melbourne’s MCG and Sydney’s Accor Stadium. But Americans looking at aerial images had one question: where’s all the parking?
American stadiums are typically surrounded by a sea of concrete. Take, for instance, Houston’s NRG Park and Stadium, which is surrounded by 26,000 parking spots (352 acres) plus another 102 acres of overflow. Conversely, the MCG is surrounded by Yarra Park, alongside multiple train stations and tram stops.
Australians online have thus been ridiculing “car-brained” Americans and gloating about our stadiums’ public transport access and urban amenities.
But Aussies shouldn’t get too boastful, and not only because cars are allowed to park in Yarra Park during AFL games. While America is certainly starting from a long way behind, Australians are pretty “car-brained” too. And many American cities are also taking steps away from car-oriented urban planning that put Australian policymakers in the slow lane.
But first, why are car parks so bad?
Aside from the less pleasant aesthetics of American stadiums’ surroundings, car parks are surprisingly costly. “In Australia, each parking space in high-density locations is worth about $100,000”, says urban planner David Mepham, who recently published the book Rethinking Parking. “Yet a lot of that parking is not very well used, if it’s used at all.”
In Melbourne, an estimated 25-41% of parking in apartment blocks in the inner city — which developers are often mandated by law to build — stand vacant. Such unused parking costs Australians more than $6 billion.
For public projects, the cost can be even higher. The Victorian government recently announced a new car park for Frankston station, which will cost approximately $174,000 per space. That money could buy a lot of extra bus services or bike infrastructure, so people wouldn’t need to drive there. But as the Morrison years taught us, politicians still go to great lengths to cut the ribbons on new car parks.
Consider the “opportunity cost” i.e. what else that space could be used for. For stadiums, the trade-off is businesses that could benefit from being within walking distance from the venue. “That’s why the MCG works so well,” says Mepham. “You’ll be spending two hours at the concert but perhaps four hours at dinner, in the park, shopping etc. In Houston, there is no symbiotic access to the building and the place where it sits, because you’re creating a buffer.”
Funnily enough, Taylor Swift herself has articulated this dynamic. When asked about her favourite city, New York, she told reporters: “In other towns or cities or whatever, things feel very spread out. But because of […] everything being on top of each other, the night falls together. I love LA, but you have to plan out exactly what you’re going to do, you have to park your car, tell your friends where to meet you […] There’s a magic about New York where you just end up somewhere else…” This is no accident — New York has fewer parking spaces than homes, and has perhaps the best public transport network in the US.
Elsewhere, the trade-offs are more dire than inconvenient pub crawls. Sprawling car parks around public transport prevent housing from being built nearby. For housing itself, minimum parking requirements increase building costs, which are then passed onto occupants. Planning requirements to add multiple parking spaces add 25% to the cost of affordable units — even if the resident doesn’t need those spaces. “On the one hand we’re talking about affordable housing,” says Mepham. “But on the other hand we’re completely ignoring one of the critical cost drivers of unaffordable housing which is unnecessary parking.”
This also means buildings take up more space, increasing the distance between buildings and making areas less walkable. This, in turn, reinforces residents’ reliance on cars, increasing traffic and pollution, and decreasing the convenience and safety of more active modes of transport. Parking fuels the need for more parking.
Why Aussies need to park our smugness
America is certainly the home of excessive parking. There are approximately 2 billion parking spaces in the US — that’s between three and eight spaces per car. They collectively cover more land than some US states. In one town — Jackson, Wyoming — there are over 27 parking spaces for each car.
Determining the total figure for Australia is more difficult. Mepham guesses that Australia has approximately 3-4 spaces per car, which would equal approximately 45-60 million spaces. This is a lot, but less than the US per capita. Previous data for specific Australian cities showed a significant but not globally aberrant number.
But Australia is heading in the wrong direction. In Melbourne, for instance, the amount of space devoted to private parking has increased by 156% over the last 20 years. The MCG’s green oasis is very much the exception.
Across the country, our car registrations have grown much faster than our population, while the distance each car is driven has dropped. By definition, these cars must now be parked for more of the time.
And, perhaps due to the severity of the problem there, American cities are racing ahead with reforms to curb excessive parking in a way Australian cities are not.
“We tend to criticise America as being completely car-oriented but that’s a generalisation,” says Mepham. “In California and Oregon, for instance, they have produced strong legislation to remove minimum parking in buildings. We’re not yet having a discussion about that here.” Other American cities have followed suit. Last year Infrastructure Victoria recommended copying the idea, and a Victorian government discussion paper endorsed it. Watch this (parking) space.
It’s great that Australians are proud of our (relatively few) walkable areas, green spaces and public transport links to major public buildings. But if we don’t reverse course, we’ll end up more like America than we’d like to think.
The world’s most stimulating capital cities are the ones with excellent public transport & where it’s prohibitively expensive to drive/park cars.
The Parisians even voted recently for a substantial increase to the price of parking larger vehicles such as SUVs. One wonders what WA Senator Cash would say.
Hard to say. And even harder to understand.
Hard on the ear but hilarious to look at.
Coming from Europe, Australia’s public transport is a joke. As are its prices.
instead of pouring millions and millions and millions of $ into building new roads invest all that money into a proper public transport net all over the country and offer attractive ticket prices to encourage people to use it and change the culture.
Life is much cheaper if you don’t need to buy a car, fill it up, pay for parking etc.
Even in European countries with exceptional public transport systems and high levels of use, still have per-capita car ownership rates around 600 per 1,000 people (so typically at least one car per household, on average), and there are European countries with car ownership similar (Italy ~750, Finland ~790) to Australia (~780).
Japan – hardly a country anyone would describe as having bad public transport – is ~660.
Yup, and still people buy them in droves. People like cars because they are convenient and useful. They do not give them up willingly.
There are two types of societies where car ownership is low: those that are poor (most), and those where car ownership is brutally & punitively taxed (Singapore, Hong Kong).
Most European countries developed towns pre-railway, pre-car. Narrow streets. Then rail came along, allowing a certain shape to urban spread clustered around stations, which left no room for the uninvented car. Come the car, and there was nowhere to park except at the kerb. Parallel parking became an art-form. Two-car households? Forget it.
Different here, mostly arranged after Henry Ford. Even commuter rail has been upgraded only after cars turned CBDs into choking hell. But at that point the damage was done and the far-flung burbs required a car to get to the station. Which is now the norm, therefore regarded as right and proper behaviour for the intelligent species while spending most of its life working for the ex, the bank, the Council, the State and the USA’s armaments industry.
Now that so many of us are actually living in their car an excess of parking space is providential. What we need is more ablution points.
Of all members of the Human Race (“Race” denoting that we like speed) I am one of the most fortunate, owning two cars and a couple of acres to park them on. The newest is a 17yr-old convertible, capable of 250km/hr if I’m feeling the same age as the car – not often. It’s for the shopping, Town being 35km away. The other is a big, lumbering, diesel-powered 4WD, created in 1999 by the Japanese out of Pilbara iron ore, and in which I can comfortably live for extended trips to desert and coast. Completely fit for purpose, it allows me the existential joy and satisfaction of picking up every scrap of garbage the tide chooses to deliver to the world’s most beautiful beaches. In case you have given up on ever actually seeing such a place, you are now able to at least imagine it knowing it exists, if only until the next tide. The beach is remote, sometimes windswept, and rarely visited. It is always sublime. It borders the Southern Ocean, engine of the world climate. The only sounds (stay with me) are the waves, the wind, the cry of shore birds and, rarely, my diesel chugging along but making frequent stops to collect. The sand is white, squeaking underfoot, and the edge of the sea is ethereal in shades of liquid sapphire, quite impossible. I have watched a humpback whale wait there, patrolling in and out for several hours until joined by a friend coming from the west, when they left together for the eastern seas. They travelled slowly, shoulder to shoulder, exchanging deep ocean gossip.
Try living without a car when both parents work, the kids have to be dropped off and collected at child care and someone has to carry the groceries home.
Yes. I have spent time living happily without a car, but now that we have kids even stepping back from two would be annoying, especially around extracurricular activities after school or on the weekend.
Once they’re out of car seats replacing the second car with taxis would almost certainly work out cheaper on paper (only does a few thousand km per year), but that’s also the “fun” car, so… no.
It’s not that it would be impossible to make the same trips on public transport, but that they would take significantly longer (45-60 minutes vs 15-20) and be significantly more inconvenient (arrive 20 minutes early or 15 minutes late) because they’re typically taking the kinds of routes public transport is not optimised for (ie: shifting people around local neighbourhoods, or to/from interchanges).
You can fit Western Europe (~2.3M sq k) into Australia (7.7M sq k) close on three times. Heavens, you can fit a third of Belgium (30.6K sq k) into same geographic space as metro Melbourne (10K sq k). The population of Western Europe is a shade shy of ten times that of Oz. I’m not saying we couldn’t have better public transport – as a regular VLIne passenger I know that fact well enough – but you might want to take these differences into account.
Even so public transport has a huge price advantage over cars (a ticket to the big city from my regional town costs $5 while the petrol cost of a one-way trip is about $18). The fact is people like their cars, and a large proportion of us have no choice but to use them anyway.
If you really wanted to fund a major extension of our public transport networks then let’s whack a decent land tax on all those properties that are within 500 metres of a tram stop or a kilometre of a train station. I can imagine how that would go down with the landlord classes.
Australia’s big on a map, but it’s nearly entirely empty.
3/4 of the population live in ten(ish) cities.
We are a very heavily urbanised country.
Part of the trouble is that European cities started long ago. The parts of Australian cities built before car use became widespread are also more livable.
Surry Hills is different, obviously …
Agree, see CBD’s allowing private vehicles vs. Europe where cars are used more for weekend shop, but not commuting; the latter is the Anglo fossil fueled Chicago plan of low density suburban housing.
I don’t see that this is something that we’re likely to turn around on either. I’m in Brisbane and its seriously no bueno – cars are king, and eff the rest.
Caboolture isn’t just unsafe for vulnerable road users, its not feasible. There is a highway that splits the town in two, and if you’re not in a motor vehicle you can’t cross it. The main interchange has a pedestrian crossing, but there are not footpaths that lead to it, you have to walk in the shoulder of a high-speed multilane road to get there.
Not just a problem in the outer reaches either. The Corinda state primary school has a biggo sign out the front saying “we’re an active transport school” courtesy of the Brisbane City Council.
The school is on a high speed multi lane road with no bike lane (not just no protected bike lane, no bike lane altogether), and large unprotected sliplanes for cars to careen around.
Bardon State School is also on a high speed road laden with heavy trucks, with no protected or otherwise cycling infrastructure, a lack of protected crossings, and drivers that do not give way to pedestrians.
The Oxley Community Facebook Page is full of people who specifically advocate not giving way to pedestrians, which is I suppose to say that they advocate for mowing down pedestrians?
Our local council election is sure to re-elect the LNP; who have already banned mid-density infill in the city, and increased minimum parking spaces per bedroom for apartments.
SEQ is a disaster.
I grew up in Brisbane but now live some three or so hours away. Our only choice is to drive, of course. There is a train line, but it only supports a tourist train once a month. We tend to drive to Brisbane, and if we have to go into the city, the car is parked outside the father-in-law’s home and we walk to the nearby train station but once we’re in the city, it’s walking everywhere, literally, or catch a bus IF you can read the timetable (if you don’t know the route, it’s near impossible to figure out which bus to get on to get to where you want). That nearby parking isn’t going to last forever, my in-laws are in their 90s.
The next option is Cleveland (also family nearby, requiring driving to the carpark at the train station) but travelling by train into the city is twice as long.
As options reduce, any existing family members live further out (majority outside the Brisbane City Council area) where the only option is to drive a car. The cost of public transport, on top of the actual travelling time, that only gets you somewhere possibly nearby from where you then need to be is a deterrent to many people, especially those with mobility issues.
The hospitals only have bus access (or an exhorbitant amount of money for carparking) but try getting on a bus using a mobility scooter? The Royal Brisbane Hospital (can’t remember it’s full name now off my head) has a train station just across the road at the Exhibition grounds which is only ever in use during events at the showgrounds. It’s been a long-standing complaint for many people that it’s not used at other times for accessing the hospital. It would certainly give staff more options, especially considering the shifts they work and if they have a shift over-run by the time they do finish there’s every possibility that the buses are no longer running, so car it is.
The very centre of Brisbane is reasonably walkable, if you’re someone without mobility issues. Apart from buses and delivery vehicles, there’s really no reason cars need to be in the centre of the city but it would take a massive improvement in public transport to make it workable.
So yes, I agree with you SEQ is a disaster.
I have good news for you on that front, the cross river rail project will turn exhibition station into a permanent train station, the cross river rail project will definitely contribute to a significant improvement in Brisbane’s PT along with the metro project. Take a look if you are interested. https://crossriverrail.qld.gov.au/stations-routes/exhibition-station/
Most of the issues you describe are aided and abetted by engineers restricting your choices to safely and conveniently travel using modes other than car. Speed limits are controlled by engineers. Whether kerbside space is used for safe passage of bikes, buses or storage of unused vehicles is controlled by engineers. Lack of crossings? Controlled by engineers. An anti-pedestrian corner at an intersection? Certified by an engineer. Once upon a time when cars were still made in Australia maybe it made *some* sense to suppress choice and enforce car monoculture so as to prop up local manufacturing jobs (Geminis were made in Acacia ridge). Now engineers are just forcing us to $h!t in our own nest for less upside than what true transport choices would unlock. Next time you receive notice of a road “upgrade” ask how many homes and businesses are being destroyed to make way for more single occupant vehicles to queue in peak hour. Is priortising a place to temporarily queue over that of places to live really the best engineering and planning can come up with? All our rates go up with less rateable land and sprawl atomisation yields less bang for buck than compactness. Most people know 1960s era transport solutions don’t work yet car centric urban road expansions keep getting designed and funded. If you can, scrutinise the robustness of the estimated return on investment, some heroic assumptions can often be found here. Funny how these are only done before the project, not afterwards to check it actually delivered touted benefits. We don’t have to put up with it. Don’t accept their derogation of ethics and responsibility to become your safety, liveability and climate problem. Make them work to justify their disaster. Similar to Newton’s first law they will not change course unless pushed. I regularly write to my local road authorities. Hopefully friendly nudges from community create change otherwise one day legislation like the workplace health and safety act is going to bite hard.
Check out American city CBD’s on Google Earth. Aside from New York and a few others, American CBD’s are around 60-70% car parks.
Think Oz cities and towns are not much better?
If the bicycle strategy copied after numerous public servants went on funded study tours of Copenhagen. Stopping off on the way back in Amsterdam to ‘mull’ it all over. Has simply not worked. Melbourne is not Copenhagen. Never will be, as Copenhagen is essentially a re-claimed swamp. If it was working, we would already be flooded with bikes. We simply are not. It’s been the greatest reallocation of Public Assest to a cohort that doesn’t exist. Bicycle corridors yes, every street no! Yes, I ride, and prefer to ride! What’s happened is just a waste.
Amsterdam and Copenhagen are extremely old cities on flat terrain. Their transit models do not translate to a new world city that grew quickly from a small site across extremely hilly terrain (Sydney for example) where even inner city suburbs were farmland 100-150years ago.
Some planners argue that the whole of the Netherlands is a giant city (see YouTube video “The Netherlands is a Giant City”) and as such its 18 million people in a small area doesn’t map to 25 million in multiple cities across a continent. S
City of Sydney Council tends to build separated cycle paths with inconsistent rules and where they’re least needed. Moore Park Rd, Fitzroy St, Wilson St, Bourke Rd.. I find them inconvenient, but I’m a seasoned cyclist, used to myopic car drivers.