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The other day, a colleague mentioned that a friend had invited her out to the new Westfield Mall in Newmarket. They were less than half a kilometre from the mall at the time, and yet the friend proposed to drive there. My colleague was appalled at the laziness of driving to somewhere so close, but the friend argued: “there’s free parking”. What this story illustrates is that if parking is there, people will use it.
The newly released National Policy Statement (NPS) on Urban Development, which is due to come into effect on August 20 will, among other directives, instruct councils in any urban area over 10,000 inhabitants to remove minimum parking standards, except for accessible car parking.
Parking minimums and maximums are typically expressed in district plans and are a tool used to control parking supply and demand. For the mall example above, in a metropolitan centre, the current Auckland Unitary Plan would have required a minimum of 1 parking space per 30m2 gross floor area, with no maximum limit.
A couple of the objectives of the plan reveal some logic behind this thinking – to support urban development in areas well served by public transport, and to support reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in urban areas. Both objectives lend themselves to supporting developments which facilitate less car travel.
In the major urban areas, particularly Auckland and Wellington, public transport networks are well established, making travel without a car viable. There have been a number of popular developments in Auckland built recently with no parking, including Commercial Bay mall on Queen Street in central Auckland. This is a model of the type of development the Policy Statement would support: a highly accessible location, next to a major railway station and a ferry port. Similarly, apartment building Modal in Mt Albert has no parking, is near a rail station and is proving popular. In both cases, the developers have been able to use the space that would have been used for parking for other more productive uses.
The NPS encourages the use of parking management plans to manage the effects of supply and demand of parking and this will become a vital tool for those councils facing challenges managing parking on site. Councils have 18 months to remove minimums from their plans – this period is an ideal time to develop parking management plans at the same time.
As stated above, some of the objectives of the NPS, and the policy change of removing parking minimums should result in changing behaviours towards a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. In the short term, the impact will be limited as developers know what people like and they will for the most part continue to provide it. Long term, developers may take the opportunity to re-think how they best utilise site space, particularly where alternative forms of transport are available.
Overall, the NPS may encourage some developers to think differently, particularly in the major centres, and this is a positive step. However, it would take the blunter instrument of parking maximums to have a more significant impact on driving behaviour. This would ensure councils and developers think more creatively around land use planning.
