The Victorian Car Parking Review: Why it Matters and What Should Happen Now

God's Abacus

There was movement on one of the most long-awaited planning reviews going around last week, with the announcement that a new Advisory Committee will examine draft car parking controls and prepare a further report.

The car parking controls have become the bad joke of Victorian planning. The current review recently passed its seven year anniversary, having been initiated in May of 2004. The original terms of reference for that review made it clear it was building on earlier work conducted by Hansen Partnership in 1999, and then-Planning Minister Robert Maclellan was telling Planning News that a review was imminent back in the mid 1990s. The draft Advisory Committee report was released in 2007, but a long silence followed: we were already making fun of the former government’s inaction on the topic in Planning News back in May of 2008. The change of government had only deepened the suspicion that we might never see action on this front.

This inaction is a problem. Car parking might not be a sexy topic, but it’s a very important one. The current car parking controls are perhaps the most notoriously dysfunctional provisions in the planning system. The most cited problem is that the rates provided for various uses are based on arcane data of dubious origin, but more serious are the issues that arise from their application to existing centres. In an established shopping centre, there is rarely any ability to provide new parking when a new business opens in an existing tenancy, meaning that a planning permit will be required for a car parking waiver. This is despite the fact that VCAT have consistently and repeatedly held (correctly) that there is no point trying to tackle regional parking shortfalls on a site-by-site basis. For Councils these permits are the ultimate in meaningless busywork, adding a lot of work for very little apparent planning purpose.

Worse, the parking controls completely undermine the structure of the zones. Uses such as shops and restaurants that should be as-of-right in shopping centres end up needing a planning permit. This administrative resistance to normal tenancy turnover is a blow to the health of strip shopping centres (many of which are already struggling), as well as being debilitating for small business people who have the temerity to want to, say, open up a shop in a former restaurant site on Lygon Street. (And that’s before we get to the dubious practical and theoretical merits of minimum car parking controls, to which I shall return).

The news that seven years of progress would be followed by another review was therefore met with a collective groan by Victorian planners. However, two points should be noted for fairness. Firstly, the current Planning Minister carries little of the responsibility for the delays to the process, which were overwhelmingly within the reign of the previous government. And secondly, he has at least managed to get something released, with draft controls being made available for comment. The Advisory Committee’s job will be to consider these controls and the public submissions about them. I suppose given the time that has elapsed it is understandable that the Minister wanted it to go back to some sort of consultation, but it is an odd sort of role for the committee to play: this might be the first instance of an Advisory Committee being appointed to do proof-reading.

At this point I should declare an interest: in my former life working at DPCD I was part of the team that worked on the drafting of the controls to implement the original Advisory Committee recommendations. I will therefore refrain from a detailed critique of the controls along the lines of my commentary on the Small Lot Housing Code. However, I can note the main features of the draft provisions:

  • A permit for a waiver will no longer be required if the parking rate stays the same, or is reduced.
  • The rates for many common uses are aligned. Combined with the above this now means that, for example, conversion of shop to restaurant and vice versa would no longer need permits.
  • There is a clearer distinction into two main considerations when considering a waiver: the first question is effectively “how much parking demand will this actually generate?” and the second is “is it nevertheless okay to provide less parking than that?”
  • Areas where special parking controls apply would be in parking overlays (meaning they would be clearly mapped in planning schemes and be picked up by legal documents such as Planning Certificates).
  • There are now various design guidelines for carparks. These shift the emphasis away from purely engineering considerations  and add some other issues like safety, landscaping, and urban design.
  • The rates now have different rates in business zones and other areas for many uses.
  • The list of parking rates is now in alphabetical order.

These changes mostly come directly from the original Advisory Committee’s recommendations and should be a big step forward. The first two points above, in particular, should combine to greatly reduce the burden of meaningless  parking waivers upon local government and small business. The Minister and DPCD would be well advised to quit messing around and implement the controls immediately: at some point, the consultation has to stop and somebody just has to make a decision.

That said, there is need for further work on two fronts. The first is that a proper empirical study of car parking rates has not been done: the Advisory Committee simply surveyed users of the system to see what they thought the rates should be.  Such anecdotal empiricism is better than nothing, and  may have been all that was possible given the resources made available to the Committee, but it falls short of the kind of detailed study that was needed and that I think most envisaged back when the review was being contemplated back in the 1990s. There is a lack of hard data underpinning the controls that is disturbing. This reinforces the tendency endemic to Victorian planning of leaving the detailed work to be done over and over again as part of individual planning assessments, rather than doing the work once, up-front, and embedding it into the planning controls.

The other issue is more fundamental, and may render the above complaint moot. This is the dubious basis for using minimum car parking controls as a planning tool in the first place. The arguments against doing so have been made out in extensive detail by Donald Shoup in his fascinating book The High Cost of Free Parking, and it’s disappointing that the Advisory Committee (or DPCD for that matter) haven’t engaged with this academic literature. I am not aware of any detailed refutation of Shoup’s study, yet both planners and traffic engineers overwhelmingly continue to proceed as if it does not exist. (Obviously I highly recommend the book, which can be purchased through Amazon by clicking the image above). The Advisory Committee only considers the philosophical and theoretical basis for minimum car parking controls fleetingly, essentially accepting the conventional wisdom that sees parking basically as an amenity problem: new uses and development create a parking impact, which it is their duty to manage. There is reference in the report to reducing demand for parking, but the idea that eliminating minimum parking controls might be a key way of doing that is not given serious consideration.

Yet as Shoup has pointed out, requiring uses to provide parking on site amounts to a subsidy for one particular mode choice (since the parking is then provided free of charge), the cost of which is then borne by developers and business. As he argues, if we want to try to encourage activity and development, and discourage traffic, why would we effectively tax the former to subsidise the latter? Minimum car parking controls stop parking from being properly priced, artificially inflating car parking parking supply and therefore traffic. They also create serious urban design problems: the “right” solution under the controls is the building surrounded by parking, whereas the classic inner-urban situation of buildings built to the street with no parking out front is implicitly seen as a problem that needs to be managed. And of course, as I have said, the whole mechanism creates a ridiculous and highly damaging administrative burden.

In Victoria, the first step has to be to implement the current round of changes. Seven years is long enough to wait, and the current reforms would provide immediate relief of some of the worst problems. But parking reform should continue with a proper review that goes back to basics on the issue.

Update, 10 October 2011: for the record, my submission to the review is here.

bonjour tristesse

Aerial image by Ken Douglas, ground level image by “Tobi.” Both used under Creative Commons Licence. Click images for details.