Greater Brisbane welcomes Brisbane City Council rethinking parking minimums — but this is just the beginning

Our city has plenty of free, publicly funded housing—it’s just we give it to cars instead of people.

The damage that parking minimums inflict on our city was one of the key reasons we started Greater Brisbane last year.

Car parks, whether they’re in apartments, on-street or anywhere else, come at the expense of better public and active transport, street trees and more productive uses like more curbside dining or shopping.

Research and evidence from around the world show the prohibitive costs of mandated parking—it drives up the cost of dwellings, reduces how much housing can be built and devalues the streetscape. This starts the conversation we need to have around building abundant housing, a city for people, not just cars.

This shouldn’t just be for a few select inner city neighbourhoods. There are many locations around the city already well provisioned with different transport options—train, metro, bus, bike and walking—that are ripe for this kind of reform. The broader we can make these changes, the easier it is to build and enable a more diverse housing market.

Parking minimums are a huge handbrake on building affordable family-sized apartments. Inner city families rarely have a single car let alone two. This one change will change the calculus for building three and four bedroom apartments in our city, making our inner city more diverse and more family friendly.

One thing Council could do today to get more cars off our inner city streets is bring in demand response pricing anywhere within an hours walk of our city’s centre.

Quotes attributable to Kurt Labuschewski, Organiser at Greater Brisbane

Our car-centric planning even makes our housing more unaffordable, with a single car park adding tens of thousands to an apartment’s cost.

We can’t beat congestion by inducing more demand on our streets and we can’t drive down demand for cars by subsidising their parking.

Let’s be properly ambitious with this. Let’s turn all our train stations and employment hubs into leafy, walkable neighbourhoods instead of car park deserts. This change doesn’t need to be just for a handful of select inner city suburbs to enjoy.

One of the things we hear time and again from industry who build beautiful medium density flats in Melbourne and Sydney is that minimum parking requirements kills any medium density project. You can’t make a six storey apartment stack up in Brisbane. And until we rip these minimums away in more places, we never will.

Ditching minimums isn’t enough. Why do these well located suburbs still have thousands of on street parks that could be home to trees, bike lanes or outdoor dining? Do these inner city roads need all these lanes anymore? This is just the beginning.

We’ll push to replace parking minimums with removal or maximums all around our city and change the conversation to a city that works for people—not cars.