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.

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.