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Bikes Lanes and Residential Development Waivers Leads to Parking Shortage

inner-city parking shortage in Melbourne

City of Melbourne’s introduction of more dedicated bike lanes and parking waivers for new residential developments is causing a significant shortfall in Melbourne CBD parking. Due to this, inner-city residents are turning to online car parking marketplace, Parkhound, to satisfy their parking needs.

“There is certainly a growing demand from inner-city residents who need to rent parking where they live”, Parkhound Co-founder Rob Crocitti confirmed. “We are getting a lot of requests from city-dwellers who have purchased or leased a property in a new development that has limited or no parking” Mr Crocitti added.

The trend marks a significant shift since the introduction of new guidelines by the City of Melbourne five years ago. In 2010 Melbourne Council introduced a maximum, rather than minimum, limit on car spaces. One-bedroom apartments were no longer eligible for a car park; two-bedroom dwellings were limited to one space and three bedrooms to two.

“More and more developments are passing planning approval without providing any car spaces and we see this trend continuing” Co-founder Michael Nuciforo added. “City residents are a resilient lot though. They are either turning to Parkhound if they own a car, or using car-sharing schemes if they don’t.”

The inner-city parking shortage has been further exasperated by the introduction of new bicycle lanes in the CBD. Physically-separated bicycle lanes on St Kilda Road and Latrobe Street have cut on-street parking significantly. A further 175 car spaces have been removed on Elizabeth St between Queensberry Street and the Haymarket roundabout over the last few months.

Comments

Nik Dow
Nik Dow
Regarding the Elizabeth Street bike lanes, which were truncated to avoid reducing the capacity of intersections for cars in peak hour (i.e. persons driving to work in the City), the parking changes are given on the City of Melbourne wedbsite at http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/ParkingTransportandRoads/cycling/Documents/ElizabethSt_bicycle_lanes_factsheet.doc as "The proposal will reduce the on-street parking spaces in the section of Elizabeth Street between Haymarket Roundabout and Queensberry Street from 76 spaces to 41 spaces. The capacity of loading zones and disabled spaces will be roughly maintained and therefore the “2P-Ticket” spaces will be reduced from 63 spaces to 30 spaces." As these are all 2P spaces, resident parking is irrelevant. Regarding St Kilda Rd, the only physically separated lane is opposite the arts centre and again only short-term parking is affected, with the loss of a small number of spaces. Really, you need to check your facts. Also, parking "shortages" are never exasperated, perhaps the owners of cars may be, but shortages could be exacerbated.

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