Lower Hutt is a very car-centric city. Very few people can choose a car-free lifestyle.
I appreciate why people buy units without off-site carparks: on-street parking is currently plentiful and unpriced. But what happens when on-street parking becomes full? Or when Council wishes to reallocate road space, such as for bus lanes or separated cycle lanes? There will be many people now reliant on on-street parking who will cry foul at the change of rules, and who will be genuinely affected.
Do you think that removing car parking requirements before being clear about the future availability and pricing of on-street parking is fair?
It seems to me that we're making it harder to reallocate road space in future, we're likely stranding some residents who will (understandably) have bought into developments lacking off-street parking on the assumption of no change to on-street parking rules, and we're letting developers take higher profits by effectively exploiting the mismatch between what myopic home buyers imagine the future might look like and what the likely future of priced on-street parking and less of it will actually be.
It doesn't seem like trading on this mismatch in expectations for the purpose of achieving a one-off increase in housing supplied at a slightly lower price, but with all those side-effects mentioned, is that smart.
In Wellington right now the Council is finding it difficult to reallocate road space away from residents' parking for the purpose of cycle lanes (e.g. in Aro Valley). Sure, residents have no codified right to park on the street forever, but ordinary people have reasonable expectations that the rules won't change rapidly and significantly. By not requiring off-street parking in years gone by, we have made the politics of changing road use more difficult.
My sense is that in parts of Wellington City the removal of parking requirements will cause a bit of a "first in, first served" mentality amongst developers. Developments in the near future will lack parking, trading on buyers' ignorance of forthcoming road space changes. On-street parking will get congested. Bus and car travel times will slow. Council will reduce on-street parking to fix these problems. Residents will be upset and roads will be less functional. Future developers will include parking, to satisfy increasingly nervous buyers, but the damage of building out 5-10 years worth of new houses without off-street parking will have been done. The demand for on-street parking will be irreversibly increased just as Council is wishing to reduce the supply of it.
One role for planning is surely to co-ordinate expectations. Deregulating parking doesn't seem consistent with that. If regulated parking minimums are what developers are going to voluntarily supply in time anyway, in response to market demand and the problems caused by deregulating parking minimums, couldn't we just avoid the problematic phase in this process altogether by getting smarter about regulated parking requirements instead of tossing them out entirely? If there's a problem with the current minimums, fix the minimums, but don't junk them entirely and create another problem altogether.
I think its important to signal early intentions for pricing on street parking. Even starting now with say a $1 equivalent a day ($365 a year) to stay longer than 2 hours, is going to get people valuing off-street parking investments or seeking a rental with an off-street car park. Ultimately, this is a trade off we should allow people to make but by not charging for on street parking, we do not enforce this trade off. Ultimately this feeds in to most of what you mention above around road space allocation.
I'm unsure what you mean by "getting smarter with parking requirements" though? What would you propose which doesn't unfairly place costs on those not wanting to buy a carpark?
Thanks for your reply. Thanks for your interesting insights too. I'm glad someone is writing about these urban issues, especially at such 'granular' scale. Details really do matter in urban policy.
I agree with you: for Councils to signal future pricing intentions for parking would be sensible. Consistency in treatment, and gradual, predictable change will help homebuyers and developers alike make sensible decisions about parking provision. A better informed market makes better decisions.
My concern is that these twin policies - deregulating off-street parking provision, and pricing on-street parking provision - are being enacted out of sync, in ways that will ultimately make the politics of road space reallocation and pricing harder and lead to transitional pain along the way.
By "getting smarter with parking requirements" I mean retaining regulated minimum off-street parking requirements, but moving them in a direction that better approximates what a market equilibrium will ultimately produce under future conditions of scarcer and priced on-street parking provision. Reduce the regulated minimums, sure, but don't toss them out entirely, with the consequence being that developers effectively adopt a temporary business model of offering up unpriced on-street parking space to their buyers for as long as that kind of promise remains credible to myopic buyers.
We can guess with reasonably certainty that at a point in the future where the demand for on-street parking resulting from developers currently selling units in parking-free developments reaches such levels that on-street parking becomes scarce, and/or becomes priced to manage scarcity, future developers will incorporate some amount of off-street parking into their offerings by choice, to reflect their buyers' preferences. That amount might be lower than the current regulated minimums. But it's unlikely that for many (or most) urbanised parts of NZ the private vehicle will disappear altogether. For better or worse, our history has left us with heavily car-dependent cities, and nothing in our public transport plans or funding models, nor any foreseeable technical changes, will alter that.
Setting the regulated minimums at a level we don't realistically expect future residents to demand less than would future-proof those developments. Residents buying into them won't be stranded in 10 years by increasingly scarce or increasingly priced access to on-street parking, and developers in the interim won't be effectively free-riding on public space by selling units to myopic buyers who aren't able to rationally foresee that free parking won't last forever.
I can't see many developments in many places - and certainly not in places like Lower Hutt - offering residents such lifestyle that they own less than about 0.5 to 1.0 cars per dwelling, on average across all the units of the development. That's just not how people in NZ live. And how people live doesn't change fast. Any regulated minimum lower than 0.5 is effectively just allowing developers to grab even more free on-street parking for their buyers, for as long as the good times last.
Is there any evidence that the regulated minimum parking requirements are excessive at present, that is, that parking spaces sit empty because the regulations require more of them to be provided than residents wish to use?
I doubt it. More often I see that residents of new developments use every off-street park provided as well as spilling over into on-street parking. That says that the regulations are currently performing a valuable role by reducing the amount of effective public subsidy to private developments provided by the availability of unpriced on-street parking. Yes, on-street parking is underpriced. People consume too much of it. But the regulations right now are a quantity restriction that is reducing that consumption. We don't solve a market failure of the price being too low in one market (on-street parking) by removing a regulation that is ensuring broadly efficient quantity of provision in another market (off-street parking).
I should address one more point: "What would you propose which doesn't unfairly place costs on those not wanting to buy a carpark?"
As best I understand, nothing stops developers unbundling dwelling ownership and off-street parking space ownership. That they currently typically bundle it indicates that so few buyers want a dwelling without a carpark that it's not worth the transactional costs and complexity of providing an unbundled offering. There would appear to be very few people in the situation of not wanting to buy a carpark, ergo, minimum unfairness and cross-subsidisation.
So long as the regulated minimums apply to the development as a whole, and do not require each dwelling to be attached to a carpark, the developer can provide off-street parking on a user-pays model and offer dwellings alone with no parking cost embedded in the sale price. That effectively means they can allocate an average parking requirement (e.g. 1 carpark per dwelling) to satisfy best the variations in demand amongst their buyers (e.g. some residents would like 2 carparks, others would like zero).
So I don't think the current rules in reality create much unfairness, or really impose any kind of price premium on those who opt for a car-free lifestyle.
Lower Hutt is a very car-centric city. Very few people can choose a car-free lifestyle.
I appreciate why people buy units without off-site carparks: on-street parking is currently plentiful and unpriced. But what happens when on-street parking becomes full? Or when Council wishes to reallocate road space, such as for bus lanes or separated cycle lanes? There will be many people now reliant on on-street parking who will cry foul at the change of rules, and who will be genuinely affected.
Do you think that removing car parking requirements before being clear about the future availability and pricing of on-street parking is fair?
It seems to me that we're making it harder to reallocate road space in future, we're likely stranding some residents who will (understandably) have bought into developments lacking off-street parking on the assumption of no change to on-street parking rules, and we're letting developers take higher profits by effectively exploiting the mismatch between what myopic home buyers imagine the future might look like and what the likely future of priced on-street parking and less of it will actually be.
It doesn't seem like trading on this mismatch in expectations for the purpose of achieving a one-off increase in housing supplied at a slightly lower price, but with all those side-effects mentioned, is that smart.
In Wellington right now the Council is finding it difficult to reallocate road space away from residents' parking for the purpose of cycle lanes (e.g. in Aro Valley). Sure, residents have no codified right to park on the street forever, but ordinary people have reasonable expectations that the rules won't change rapidly and significantly. By not requiring off-street parking in years gone by, we have made the politics of changing road use more difficult.
My sense is that in parts of Wellington City the removal of parking requirements will cause a bit of a "first in, first served" mentality amongst developers. Developments in the near future will lack parking, trading on buyers' ignorance of forthcoming road space changes. On-street parking will get congested. Bus and car travel times will slow. Council will reduce on-street parking to fix these problems. Residents will be upset and roads will be less functional. Future developers will include parking, to satisfy increasingly nervous buyers, but the damage of building out 5-10 years worth of new houses without off-street parking will have been done. The demand for on-street parking will be irreversibly increased just as Council is wishing to reduce the supply of it.
One role for planning is surely to co-ordinate expectations. Deregulating parking doesn't seem consistent with that. If regulated parking minimums are what developers are going to voluntarily supply in time anyway, in response to market demand and the problems caused by deregulating parking minimums, couldn't we just avoid the problematic phase in this process altogether by getting smarter about regulated parking requirements instead of tossing them out entirely? If there's a problem with the current minimums, fix the minimums, but don't junk them entirely and create another problem altogether.
Kia ora Tim.
I think its important to signal early intentions for pricing on street parking. Even starting now with say a $1 equivalent a day ($365 a year) to stay longer than 2 hours, is going to get people valuing off-street parking investments or seeking a rental with an off-street car park. Ultimately, this is a trade off we should allow people to make but by not charging for on street parking, we do not enforce this trade off. Ultimately this feeds in to most of what you mention above around road space allocation.
I'm unsure what you mean by "getting smarter with parking requirements" though? What would you propose which doesn't unfairly place costs on those not wanting to buy a carpark?
Thanks for engaging.
Ngā mihi
Malcolm
Hi Malcolm,
Thanks for your reply. Thanks for your interesting insights too. I'm glad someone is writing about these urban issues, especially at such 'granular' scale. Details really do matter in urban policy.
I agree with you: for Councils to signal future pricing intentions for parking would be sensible. Consistency in treatment, and gradual, predictable change will help homebuyers and developers alike make sensible decisions about parking provision. A better informed market makes better decisions.
My concern is that these twin policies - deregulating off-street parking provision, and pricing on-street parking provision - are being enacted out of sync, in ways that will ultimately make the politics of road space reallocation and pricing harder and lead to transitional pain along the way.
By "getting smarter with parking requirements" I mean retaining regulated minimum off-street parking requirements, but moving them in a direction that better approximates what a market equilibrium will ultimately produce under future conditions of scarcer and priced on-street parking provision. Reduce the regulated minimums, sure, but don't toss them out entirely, with the consequence being that developers effectively adopt a temporary business model of offering up unpriced on-street parking space to their buyers for as long as that kind of promise remains credible to myopic buyers.
We can guess with reasonably certainty that at a point in the future where the demand for on-street parking resulting from developers currently selling units in parking-free developments reaches such levels that on-street parking becomes scarce, and/or becomes priced to manage scarcity, future developers will incorporate some amount of off-street parking into their offerings by choice, to reflect their buyers' preferences. That amount might be lower than the current regulated minimums. But it's unlikely that for many (or most) urbanised parts of NZ the private vehicle will disappear altogether. For better or worse, our history has left us with heavily car-dependent cities, and nothing in our public transport plans or funding models, nor any foreseeable technical changes, will alter that.
Setting the regulated minimums at a level we don't realistically expect future residents to demand less than would future-proof those developments. Residents buying into them won't be stranded in 10 years by increasingly scarce or increasingly priced access to on-street parking, and developers in the interim won't be effectively free-riding on public space by selling units to myopic buyers who aren't able to rationally foresee that free parking won't last forever.
I can't see many developments in many places - and certainly not in places like Lower Hutt - offering residents such lifestyle that they own less than about 0.5 to 1.0 cars per dwelling, on average across all the units of the development. That's just not how people in NZ live. And how people live doesn't change fast. Any regulated minimum lower than 0.5 is effectively just allowing developers to grab even more free on-street parking for their buyers, for as long as the good times last.
Is there any evidence that the regulated minimum parking requirements are excessive at present, that is, that parking spaces sit empty because the regulations require more of them to be provided than residents wish to use?
I doubt it. More often I see that residents of new developments use every off-street park provided as well as spilling over into on-street parking. That says that the regulations are currently performing a valuable role by reducing the amount of effective public subsidy to private developments provided by the availability of unpriced on-street parking. Yes, on-street parking is underpriced. People consume too much of it. But the regulations right now are a quantity restriction that is reducing that consumption. We don't solve a market failure of the price being too low in one market (on-street parking) by removing a regulation that is ensuring broadly efficient quantity of provision in another market (off-street parking).
I should address one more point: "What would you propose which doesn't unfairly place costs on those not wanting to buy a carpark?"
As best I understand, nothing stops developers unbundling dwelling ownership and off-street parking space ownership. That they currently typically bundle it indicates that so few buyers want a dwelling without a carpark that it's not worth the transactional costs and complexity of providing an unbundled offering. There would appear to be very few people in the situation of not wanting to buy a carpark, ergo, minimum unfairness and cross-subsidisation.
So long as the regulated minimums apply to the development as a whole, and do not require each dwelling to be attached to a carpark, the developer can provide off-street parking on a user-pays model and offer dwellings alone with no parking cost embedded in the sale price. That effectively means they can allocate an average parking requirement (e.g. 1 carpark per dwelling) to satisfy best the variations in demand amongst their buyers (e.g. some residents would like 2 carparks, others would like zero).
So I don't think the current rules in reality create much unfairness, or really impose any kind of price premium on those who opt for a car-free lifestyle.