Every street in my suburb is choked with parked cars because everyone has filled their garages with shit and decided the road is for personal long-term vehicle storage.
Even the 2-bed units have two cars each and at least one is on the street.
Seems more like a problem with the local streetscape devoting space to long term storage of vehicles.
One thing councils are competent at is issuing parking fines, if only the appropriate restrictions were in place.
My personal preference would be to see residential access roads transformed into communal green spaces with basic access paths for pedestrian/cycle/emergency/utility purposes.
The councils are very hit-and-miss for issuing fines.
I’ve copped $150 fines for overhanging 1 metre into a no-stopping zone for 15 seconds while picking up a passenger.
Yet, I report abandoned cars that have been there for months, and end up smashing the windows on them 6 months later. So far, window-smashing has proven to be the most effective by far.
Where I live in Australia many new apartment buildings don’t even provide a single carpark space for the cheapest units anymore- just a bike spot. All the streets around these buildings become choked with cars of residents and visitors, which negatively impacts the lives of people who already lived in the area. Nothing is done to improve public transport, and now we’re being told that the few car spaces they have to provide should be scrapped…to drive down rents? I call BS. It would only maximise profits of developers to do even less than they currently do. I don’t know where they got their data for this report but it’s clearly not in my suburb.
I’m sure it varies from place to place, but where I live in Melbourne, we had to apply for special approval to build without a car park for my apartment. (I didn’t want a car park, because I don’t have or want a car.) The regulations are usually that every apartment must have a place to park a car, unless an exception is granted.
I think it’s interesting that you are I disagree on this.
From my point of view, there should not be a requirement to include a car park, because that space and resources that are necessary devoted to cars which further entrenches car dependency, even if people would otherwise have not used a car. But it sounds like your point of view is that there should be a requirement to include a car park, because cars are near universal, and without a car park in the apartment, the car must go elsewhere… (And again, from my point of view, on-street parking regulations should be such that people simply cannot store their car like that. If you buy an apartment without a car park, then you should not have a car. If you need a car, then you also need to buy/rent a car park for yourself. It should not be an externality.)
Anyway, one thing I think we do agree on is that it would be nice to improvement public transport services. That would be better for everyone, even if they don’t use it. (Because it reduce traffic for people in cars, while providing better transport for people not in cars.)
We do agree on public transport. I don’t believe car parking spaces entrenches dependency on cars though. If we want to reduce cars on the road, reducing places to park them is not the best place to start. Car parking space in residential buildings can have several other uses for people who don’t want to park a car in it. If you find yourself with an unused car space you can even rent that out for good money. Half my garage at home has bikes and kayaks and solar batteries in it. Developers shouldn’t just have to provide adequate parking for residential buildings, they should also be required to have those car spaces electric charging ready to help adoption of electric cars. A big problem for apartment living is there is nowhere to charge an electric car and you can’t install a charger yourself. You’re lucky in Melbourne you have the best public transport system in the country, and I hear some people still don’t think it’s good enough. I can’t see us getting away from cars being a primary mode of transport in my lifetime though. I inquired to a real estate agent selling a 1br unit for $850k once, he said it had no car space but it came with a free ebike and spot to leave it in the carpark, teenage me would have been thrilled.
If developing property becomes more profitable, there will be more competition in the market.
That aside, underground parking spaces are ridiculously expensive to build and requiring every apartment resident to pay for parking spaces regardless of how many they use just drives up car ownership, which is what really drives down the quality of a city.
To my complete surprise, in Bavaria in Germany it’s illegal to use your garage for anything else than storing your cars. I mean it’s not checked a lot but still…
I can’t say it’s always the case, but a lot of places built in the early 2000s - 2010s had insufficient storage space, necessitating people using garages for storage.
I will forever feel sympathy to whoever currently lives in one apartment I remember viewing back in 2010 - where one of the bedrooms was literally 2m x 2.7m and no BIR.