Priority 03: Rethinking Parking

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

This comes at the expense of better public and active transport, street trees and more productive uses like more curbside dining or shopping.

Our car-centric planning even makes our housing more unaffordable, with Australian research suggesting that each car park in a new apartment building adds up to $150,000 to the cost of the home.

Even linking off-street parking requirements to the number of bedrooms may lead to inappropriate parking allocations for almost 35% of households.

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.

Getting cars off the road makes our streets friendlier, reduces commuting times and moves people into cleaner, greener modes of transport.

We need to:

• remove level and onstreet parking near main roads and CBDs
• bring in demand-responsive pricing in the city
• replace parking minimums with parking maximums
• invest in active and public transport infrastructure, particularly in the outer suburbs