Car parking - solutions?

[#Metro]

P&R does make PT functional and more useful in many cases. That's why in many cases it is provided, and continues to be provided, and enjoys high public support, even against a continued campaign to make it a taboo access mode.

[Jonno]

Some cases not many! Very different also to almost every case here in SEQ.

They are also unsafe places at night so have no place in our urban centres. 

We should not be spending those valuable/limited public transport $ on urban park n rides.

[Jonno]

Great little reel by Strong Towns

[Jonno]

Another joins leading practice!!

https://x.com/berkie1/status/1819206823536202006?s=46&t=EDszjTErsxTIqAna7yuP-w

[achiruel]

Loganlea P&R is is packed today, and overflowing on to surrounding streets. It's like a weekday here. I imagine a lot are going to the Ekka, but maybe some are just taking advantage of the 50¢ fares to go to the Gold Coast and such. I'm not surprised about the P&R use, though. The 560 only runs until ~5 pm on Sundays, the 562 and 587 don't run at all. 564 and 568 both finish before 5 pm. How do they expect people to get to the train?!

[ozbob]

See Sunshine Coast discussion > https://railbotforum.org/mbs/index.php?msg=286419

https://x.com/ozbob13/status/1823734561966280935

[Jonno]

See Sunshine Coast discussion > https://railbotforum.org/mbs/index.php?msg=286419

https://x.com/ozbob13/status/1823734561966280935

Just remove the street/public parking and make streets pedestrian/cycling oriented.

[ozbob]

https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1827459334655070319

[Jonno]

Great thread

[#Metro]

It is important to remember that modes are tools, and each job is different.

Scale. Trains just carry too many people compared to cars. Most suburban stations see many thousands of passengers per day.

A Sydney train holds over 1200 people.

The huge new Rooty Hill car park is taller than nearby apartments. But it only has 650 spaces, half a train.

While it is true that trains carry a large number of people, it is also true that most train lines consist of more than one station.

A hypothetical train line consisting of 10 stations with car parks at each would generate:
650 car parks x 10 stops x 1.2 passengers/vehicle factor = 7,800 pphd.

Given that a metro line might do 24,000 pphd in peak hour, that might contribute ~ 30% of the peak hour patronage, which is not an insignificant amount.

In addition to this, car parking can provide access to the station that buses cannot provide, either due to low density, road layout issues, or due to the time penalty that buses incur when they make stops and indirect routing they often take.

Cost. A surface-level park is in the order of $30,000/space. A multi-story space could be well over $150,000/space. The controversial Woy Woy park was costed at $210,000/space

Car parking is expensive.

However a car park might have a life of 30-40 years before requiring replacement and therefore the cost needs to be spread across the life of the asset. Similarly, the cost of operating bus services for that same 30-40 year period at a standard that would attract the same number of passengers is also very expensive, and potentially more expensive than constructing a car park in some cases. Again, it depends on the circumstances and the site. The author does not provide a comparison cost for bus service operation over a 30-40 year period that would generate similar patronage.

Discouraging alternatives. Walking, biking and buses are more economical. But of course, your car is way more convenient, so why walk when there's a free car park for you?

How much is the car park really adding to the station's catchment? 6/8

This statement implies or asserts an answer (e.g. car parking does not contribute much to the catchment) without actually presenting an answer explicitly or providing evidence. The statement also overlooks the possibility that a car park can be priced, as they are in Perth.

Commuters generally set aside 10 minutes time to access the station. The area that can be walked in 10 minutes is going to be far far smaller than the area a car can drive in 10 minutes. Perth data shows the catchment area for station car parking is somewhere around ~ 40 km2. You are simply not going to get that sort of catchment size with a bicycle or on foot. Hence, if you apply this no-car approach to a low-density city or stations with low density around them you are going to reduce patronage and/or potentially make construction of a rail line to certain areas unviable.

Land use. These massive car parks take up a ton of prime land around the station. That's land that should be used for shops, housing, community facilities and so on. These are pushed further out by parking.

Instead of a lively community, it's a dead zone with bad traffic. 7/8

In many cases a TOD would provide fewer passengers than an equivalent car park on the same land. To evaluate one way or another, you would do a side-by-side comparison and calculate to see if car park > TOD or TOD > car park in terms of passenger numbers at a specific location. Planning assessments should do this, if they aren't already.

The TOD definition itself has a loose meaning and should be standardised to mean a development where 50% or more of the transport task is served using non-car modes.

In addition to the above, high-density development is very expensive. There are additional costs if a development is directly above a train station. As a result, only certain stations are financially viable for developers, and many other sites are not.

A car park can always be demolished and replaced with a higher and better use development if a) it can be shown that TOD > Car Park in terms of passenger numbers at the specific site, and b) if there is market demand and it is financially viable to place development there.

In any serious transit system, commuter parks don't cut it.

Is the Perth train network, which runs frequent service to all 70+ stations (except one) on all days of the week non-serious? Melbourne and Sydney feature several lines or sections of lines where frequency is > 15 minutes, unlike Perth.

Not every situation can be treated with the European city model. There needs to be recognition that the approach taken can be different depending on whether we are dealing with a medium to high density situation, or a situation where the density is much lower.

Notes

Application of a commuter railway to low density settlement, Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics (2009). Peter Martinovich, Director of Rail Infrastructure Planning, Public Transport Authority of WA. https://www.bitre.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-12/2009_infrastructure_colloquium_peter_martinovich.pdf

[Jonno]

Leave it the those who know how this works.  Park n rides are a very last resort

[#Metro]

Leave it the those who know how this works.  Park n rides are a very last resort.

The WA PTA has a very solid research culture, contributing to many reports and conferences (see the research thread on this forum).

It is this approach that has allowed the PTA to deliver excellent outcomes for passengers despite high car reliance, low density, low population etc.

Perth data shows the catchment area for station car parking is somewhere around ~ 40 km2. You are simply not going to get that sort of catchment size with a bicycle or on foot. Hence, if you apply this no-car approach to a low-density city or stations with low density around them you are going to reduce patronage and/or potentially make construction of a rail line to certain areas unviable.

^ Important points!

[Jonno]

Let me fix that

Perth data shows the catchment area for station car parking is somewhere around ~ 40 km2. You are simply not going to get that sort of catchment size with a bicycle or on foot. Hence, if you apply this no-car approach to a poorly planned car-centric sprawl or stations with incorrect zoning around them you are going to reduce patronage and/or potentially make construction of a rail line to certain areas unviable.

[timh]

Jonno, this is where I find your logic is basically backwards.

You want Brisbane to be like Amsterdam in the way our public (and especially active) transport works. You acknowledge that our urban form is nothing like Amsterdam, yet you want the bike lanes/road diets/lrt everywhere IMMEDIATELY.

The simple fact is that most Australian cities have been largely built and planned around cars for the last 70 or so years, and reorganising transit isn't going to change car culture overnight. It's a very slow process that requires a lot more from the urban planning/zoning/building code side than it does from the transport side.


The way I see park n rides are as a temporary solution. They work now for certain stations on the suburban fringe that are in very car centric areas (Springfield, Coomera, etc.). The density of the way those areas were built simply necessitates the park n ride to get people to the station. Good luck planning a decent bus route through most of the irritatingly winding, narrow suburban streets of Springfield.
And as Metro put it, they work very well. Springfield and Coomera are very well patronised stations.
I wouldn't be supporting a park n ride being built at say, Yeerongpilly or Coorparoo. That's dumb. But the further out stations it makes sense because if you DON'T build them, people aren't just gonna be like "oh ok guess I'll walk then". No, they'll still drive and just absolutely clog up surrounding streets with illegally parked cars. If you want an example of this, go take a look at the streets around Altandi station in the morning peak and the amount of parking management signs and whatnot that council have had to put in on the surrounding side streets.

HOWEVER in the long term, once densification has caught up (you can't build that overnight) and people's habits start to shift, suddenly you have all this prime, government owned land sitting largely vacant right next to the station that could be sold to developers, retained and turned into public housing, etc

Look at the site on the old fish market in Melbourne CBD. Was once a carpark, is now a giant apartment building.

We live in a city that was victim to Fordism through the 20th century and it takes a long time to break that cycle. Park n rides are a stop gap solution for certain areas.

[Jonno]

But we are not densifying except in some limited places whilst in a housing crisis and at the same time not providing anywhere near the preferred mix of housing. 

Park n rides are a not a temporary solution here in SEQ They are the only solution

Whilst low density (easily dense enough to make active and public transport work) planning remains untouched.

Using density to justify car-centric policies is also not supported by the research. That is 1970's transport planning as are park n rides.

PA Both Coomera and Springfield were designed/meant to be walkable, low-car developments, 15min neighbourhoods (under various names) until the politicians got involved.

https://x.com/the_transit_guy/status/1827733448468938861?s=46&t=EDszjTErsxTIqAna7yuP-w

[JimmyP]

timh that would be a fair point if there were any real moves to take Brisbane in a less car-cebtric direction, but there just aren't. Everything development being built seems to further solidify Brisbane as more and more car-centric, with public transport as an afterthought and active transport barely on the radar at all.
And before Metro starts spruiking about how awesome Perth is and they use car parking etc., just because Perth has managed to squeeze a bit of public transport in to an otherwise car-centric city (and it continues to be that too), doesn't mean we should be aiming for the same thing. We should be aiming for better! Perth does well enough, but it is still a mess of low density, car-centric urban sprawl.

Sure, some of Jonno's views are a bit extreme, but we need to start somewhere, and that's not by continuing to build American style low density, car centric suburban sprawl and just building more and more carparking at every station so stations are just an island in a massive carpark.
Good quality feeder buses, proper active transport links and facilities at the stations needs to start actually happening, not just put off in to the never never while we just build bigger and bigger carparks.

Carparks have their place, but they should be the option of last resort, not options 1, 2, 3 ... 100, then some sort of feeder service.

[#Metro]

With P&R the public transport can go in right now. There is no need to wait for land use changes to catch up. That is the key difference between the two approaches / models.

There is also no loss of the land either - land isn't consumed - so you can always periodically test for interest in the land parcel to see if a) there is development interest and b) the condition patronage TOD > Car Park is true.

If both conditions exist, you can demolish the car park and put your buildings there.

[Jonno]

I have heard it all now.  Build a car park and you can just replace it.  Good luck with that.  NIMBY training ground I would surmise. 

I will restate my point.  Why build car parking when we desperately need housing that meets the mix of housing people would prefer to live in...and that housing works better than P&R on many levels.  So why?  We have P&R at almost each station that should be a minimum of 5 stores (many up to 8-10 stories). We are in a housing crisis yet we still building housing for cars during the day and abandoned lots at night.   

[#Metro]

Because:

- Not every site is interesting to a developer (either commercial or govt) even with permissive zoning.

For a commercial developer it needs to have a minimum rate of return (say 8-10% ROI) and for govt the location needs to have political support/funding plus high public benefit. Not all locations satisfy these conditions.

- Not every TOD will generate sufficient patronage to support Priority A transit (rail/busway) just on walk-up alone vs a P&R. TODs need to be over a certain size for the condition patronage TOD > Car Park to be true.

I am happy to work with you on getting TOD in places where we can (e.g. Albion).

[Jonno]

Thank god this maths BS was not around when the cities we wish to emulate were created or they did not allow it to stop good development.  Car parking over housing for people is just a perverse position. 

[JimmyP]

Building a carpark to get PT use "now" is so ridiculously backwards thinking. The only thing it does is get people used to (train, if you will) driving and parking at the station, making it exponentially more difficult to remove at a later time.
Putting on the bus services and providing proper active transport links off the bat, along with minimal car parking (yes, some P&R will be required in some places, but should always be minimal) means people don't develop the habit of driving to the station in the first place!
A proper TOD plus proper feeder bus services and frequent rail will, in many cases, significantly out perform a car park in pretty much any metric that could be measured.
A car park is generally used by 1 car per day. That's it. 500 car parks, might be used by 550 cars a day (weekday) if you're lucky. That's between 550 and 800 people making use of that massive waste of land per day.
A good quality TOD would have a couple hundred living there to start with, feeder buses bringing in the rest and more. 1 Feeder bus route every 15mins? You've made up the capacity shortfall within 3-4hrs. So you still have 10+hrs of capacity to bring more people to/from the area. That's without even looking at active transport links or more than 1 feeder bus route, which in most cases more than 1 route would be required.
Design high quality, non-car based links to hubs and stations, people will use them.
Make it less convenient to drive somewhere and more convenient to go by public/active transport, people will use it. Make it easy to take your car everywhere and inconvenient to use public/active transport, guess what? People will drive!

Good public/active transport goes hand in hand with good town planning. We have neither at the moment. That isn't going to change by continually building more and more car parking.

[#Metro]

A train station with a P&R and a train station with a TOD would and could both have feeder buses, so it isn't the patronage point of difference you are presenting it to be. There is nothing stopping a train station with a P&R having frequent feeder buses.

Plenty of Perth train stations have frequent feeder buses, but the train station itself is in the middle of a freeway and so there isn't a TOD there, for example.

The point of difference is the walk up. Would the walk up be more or less if you had car parks in the walk up zone or apartments (assuming a developer even found the site commercially interesting, which isn't always the case).

JimmyP, how many apartments would be required on a site to yield the same walk up patronage as say an 800 space P&R?

[JimmyP]

Considering a P&R carpark is used ince a day mostly, and even then only on weekends, its likely not as much as you think. And unlike some, i'm not just going to pull random numbers out of my a$$ to pretent i'm proving my point, because I do not actually have that data and do not work in that field.
A TOD however would have many more external benefits over a P&R in tge same place. Well considered TOD would be a much friendlier place to be rather than a sea of carparks. The feeling of safety is much greater in a well maintained precinct vs a carpark, especially late at night. A proper TOD is a place people would actually visit (ie: retail/commercial as well as residential), thereby generating even more traffic for public/active transport for the area.

And the point you seem to be deliberately missing here Metro is that yes, feeder buses can be used with P&Rs, but in SEQ, they aren't! Just more and more and more carparking.

How much land does 800 carparks use? Or are we now wasting more money building multi-storey carparks, which according to you will soon enough be torn down to make way for development? Its completely insane.

We keep building carparks first and foremost, then at some point in the distant future put on some rambling, low frequency, slow feeder service and wonder why nobody uses it and then claim P&R must be the answer!

If we ever build an 800(!!!!!) Space carpark at a station, we have failed. Miserably.

[Jonno]

No doubt the Lord Mayor will announce multi-storey car parks at all stations tomorrow since he is leading transport planning in SEQ and it's about as cars and not people right!

[andrewr]

To muddy the waters a bit more here, but walkability is just really bad across the PT network. I'm neither here nor there on commuter car parking but it really needs to be weighed up with improvements to the surrounding active transport. In nearly all cases car parking solves only one end of the commute. For CBD destinations walkability is usually pretty good but otherwise it's really hit or miss (mostly miss).

The Coopers Plains level crossing upgrade would have seen pedestrians having to walk over a giant structure in the hot sun to get to Coopers Plains or  station (see map and video below). No doubt many people catching the train would have driven to the station with that sort of design. Only after community feedback from numerous individuals did they put in a pedestrian access tunnel into the design. The active transport component is ultimately a really small part of the overall cost of this overpass but for many users it would be a deciding factor for walking/riding versus driving instead.



Eight Mile Plains has a mega park 'n' ride that has been added to multiple times, most recently in 2019. I did read years ago that there was a plan to build a pedestrian bridge over the motorway to the local technology park to improve walkability, but I can't find it now. At the moment it's about a 15 minute walk around to the tech park and rather hot and unshaded (map).

Another example - Our Lady of Lourdes school in Sunnybank has poor access to the local train stations (map). Altandi is particularly notable here as it's an express stop with all GC and Beenleigh trains stopping here but it's badly located for a whole raft of reasons. The Altandi bridge over Mains Road was replaced (I believe) around 2006-2007, but they didn't put in a pedestrian underpass. People swapping to a local bus route (130/140) need to cross a busy set of lights and 7 lanes of traffic. There isn't currently a footpath around the church (the most obvious path) so commuters walk through the car park. In 2021 a business plan was implemented to expand car parks to add a further 50 car spaces but they decided not to proceed with it. The plan would have added a missing footpath in the car park but otherwise no real change to improve walkability and connections to local destinations via the bus route or to the local schools.

[ozbob]

50 cent fares heap pressure on suburban streets | 7NEWS

[Jonno]

Of course when your #1 message to people is that park n rides are critical to using public transport then people don't think of "maybe I can just walk"

...and if you don't provide safe cycling infrastructure then people avoid cycling.

Last place in public transport goes to...long time position holder Brisbane!!!

[JimmyP]

Good urban/city planning + high quality active and public transport links = minimal need for carparking and a much nicer environment all round.

Unfortunately we have none of that in Brisbane.

[#Metro]

50 cent fares heap pressure on suburban streets | 7NEWS

The Altandi station case isn't due to a lack of feeder buses though, there is a bus a minute or so in the peak and very high frequency BUZ service all day.

It would be very interesting to do a lookup of number plates and see where these cars are coming from.

My guess is that they come from places near existing bus routes that are already frequent.

If that is the case, it would thus demonstrate strong evidence that even if bus service quality was high and almost free, you would *still * have high demand for parking (assuming it is unpriced / free).

[Jonno]

50 cent fares heap pressure on suburban streets | 7NEWS

The Altandi station case isn't due to a lack of feeder buses though, there is a bus a minute or so in the peak and very high frequency BUZ service all day.

It would be very interesting to do a lookup of number plates and see where these cars are coming from.

My guess is that they come from places near existing bus routes that are already frequent.

If that is the case, it would thus demonstrate strong evidence that even if bus service quality was high and almost free, you would *still * have high demand for parking (assuming it is unpriced / free).

seriously are you a RACQ plant?

[#Metro]

seriously are you a RACQ plant?

If you have evidence to the contrary regarding Altandi, please provide it. I'm happy to be wrong.

Altandi has multiple high frequency BUZ routes going to it. So we can't attribute it to poor bus access.

It might be that people's access preferences are car > bus, even if the bus is frequent and almost free.

That would be consistent with what we know about people wanting to keep their access times to around 10 min, independent of mode chosen.

How else do you explain the observation Jonno?

[Jonno]

I would start with the 300m very indirect connection between stops and the one-seat trip design of BCC bus routes.  SEQ does not have a transfer public transport culture.

Again plenty of cities show that not having car parks at stations works They have great active transport integration, density around station (not detached houses) and have created a culture of hop on hop off.  But they don't have BCC ruling the roost.

[#Metro]

Amsterdam has park and ride, which demonstrates that 'it depends'.

Something can be true in a general case and false in a specific context.

Park and Ride (P+R)
https://www.amsterdam.nl/en/parking/park-ride/




(numbers are free spaces left out of the total).

[JimmyP]

Yes, Amsterdam/the Netherlands does have P&R, in small amounts. The vast, vast majority of people who access PT in NL do so via walking, biking or other public transport connections.

Nobody here has the data to determine where the Altandi parkers come from, c'mon mate, you don't either, so you can't actually use that for any sort of claim. Stop pulling s##t out of your backside to try to justify your odd current hobby horse that massive P&Rs are the best thing ever.

As Jonno said, while Mains Rd has good amounts of bus services along it, its not well connected to the actual station. Its a large faff actually, especially inbound bus to the station having to negotiate crossing Mains Rd.
Plus, we're in Brisbane, people choose their car first because they always have and there is no real incentive to do otherwise! Thay's a major thing we're trying to change here!! 🤦♂️

[ozbob]

Brisbanetimes --> Hate parking at the train station? Travis has found another solution $

Travis Bassett is one of thousands of Brisbane commuters who catch a train to the city for work, but an earlier trip – the one to public transport – is just as important.

It takes Bassett six minutes to ride his bicycle from home to the Graceville train station.

It's actually quicker – by his calculations, about 40 seconds so – than driving, finding a park and walking to the station. And he enjoys the exercise, while people living near the station enjoy one less car crowding their street.

The state government's 50¢ flat fares – which were made permanent on Sunday – have caused the number of public transport trips across south-east Queensland to soar. They were 5.3 per cent higher in the first week of September, compared with the same week pre-COVID.

Not only have travellers saved $36.8 million in fares, the shift in habits has enormous potential for slashing congestion, especially if there's no need to hop in a car first.

Distances of up to five kilometres are considered "ideal" for bike riding, and half of all car trips from home to public transport are less than three kilometres. ...