There’s a story in today’s NZ Herald about a kindergarten that is probably going to have to be shifted in Pt Chevalier, disrupting the lives of many many families – all because of our stupid parking requirement rules:
The early childhood education of more than 200 children is up in the air following plans to bulldoze an Auckland kindergarten – so the land can be turned into a carpark.
Pt Chevalier Kindergarten has been told its lease at Pt Chevalier Primary School will come to an end next year as the land is needed for more carparking – a council requirement when eight new classrooms are built to cater for an increasing roll.
The general manager of the Auckland Kindergarten Association is obviously upset, and asks whether creative solutions can be found:
“We will ask the Ministry to redouble its efforts to find an alternative local site for the kindergarten.
“And we will ask the Auckland City Council and Mayor Len Brown if they might find a ‘creative solution’ that would allow the school to meet parking regulations without having to build a carpark on the kindergarten site.”
This misses the point really. Why on earth should the kindergarten have to move at all? Would it be the end of the world if the additional classrooms were put on the site without the new carpark?
If there was ever a final nail in the coffin for our stupid minimum parking requirement planning rules, hopefully this situation is it. Come on Auckland Council, stop being so pig-headed.
Definitely a case for clemency on the part of our parking gods.
Teachers have this belief that they need to drive to school. This is because of location, resources and book marking. These are all interesting reasons to why teachers believe it is important to drive. The location of many schools is not well suited to public transport routes.
Maybe it would be a good incentive to offer teachers the money or the park?
Point Chev School is a few streets from the new Outer Link, so isn’t that remote from public transport.
This is tragic!
In LA, subsidised publich transport tickets are offered – often either free or ‘salary sacrifice’ so from gross not net wages – rather than a parking space. Very popular too.
These parking regulations sound ridiculous.
Minimum parking requirements are ridiculous – but just note that you also have them in LA (and everywhere else in the US, Australia, NZ). From memory they were first applied in LA way back in the 1950s.
Don’t under-estimate their horrific negative impacts on transport/land use outcomes. Most of our politicians bear a huge responsibility for not doing their utmost to get rid of these regulations.
Council rules require 2 parking spaces for each new classroom but this is all just election year attention grabbing.
The school really needs the land & will be pushing the kindergarten out anyway.
The trouble is that land is scarce in this area. The bowling club is the most likely target, or possibly the Anglican Church.
This is nuts — Pt Chev has a reputation as a highly desirable “child friendly” suburb precisely because there isn’t much traffic on the peninsula. Nor are there very many cars parked on the street.
And yet the Council is full of planners producing sustainability plans, full of pretty pictures of pohutukawas
Seriously, a good thing to look into would be whether the land use planning side of Council is able to influence parking policy.
My impression is that they have been in completely separate planning vs engineering silos or that they would have been up until amalgamation.
Hopefully parking policy hasn’t been devolved to Auckland Transport, on the grounds that it’s a minor engineering matter, while the planners get on with drawing up more sustainability plans full of pretty pictures of pohutukawas.
It’s a planning/operations issue. Basically the problem arises because of a separation between “parking policy” (land use planning) and “parking management” (operations team). So we’re in a situation where the planners don’t trust the operations guys to manage the increased demand for parking that might result from removing minimums.
Problem is – the medicine is killing the patient. I suspect that even if the resulting demand for parking was not managed, we’d still be better off than what we are now with minimums. The engineers are really just the lackies that draw up the standards in response to the planners request.
But that raises another problem: Your average transport engineers generally has no understanding of economics, and sees demand as an immutable force of nature – rather than a predictable (and malleable) socio-economic response to relative benefits and costs of driving versus alternatives.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for some double stackers and a bit of coordination between teachers. But I suspect there is a whole lot of local politics being played out here between the school and the kindy
Really don’t go there, GW, an expensive high tech way to subsidise more driving? Just remove the requirement, everywhere, and we will all still find our way around. And what if, by having to pay for parking, we discovered it works better to use transit? Auckland would be a better place and there would be more demand to improve PT services.
If there is a car park regulation for schools then it isn’t being enforced uniformly. Consent has been given for a new Lollipops (90 kids) next to Bayfield Early Childcare on Jervois Rd and there has been no increased parking requirement.
Westmere Primary has grown massively and I don’t think the number of parks has increased either.
although it is interesting. I once was handing out leaflets outside a primary school in Pt Chev (not sure if it the same one) at pick up time (yes, I know, what kind of person does that?).
anyway, my god there were a lot of cars around! Parents were literally turning up half an hour early so they could get a parking space to pick up their little darling. I wanted to grab them by the lapels and shake them and say “Could you have walked from your house in that half an hour? Could you? Could you?” But I didn’t because it would have kind of undermined the purpose of my presence there at the site. Besides, for all I know they simply couldn’t spare the time to walk to school and back with their child. although I’ll wager that if they had their child’s attention span would have been higher and their physical health better. Aaanyway….
The Auckland City requirement of 2 car parks per classroom would mean, for a say 30 classroom school with 30 teachers and 10 admin/support staff, 60 carparks required. However in Manukau, the requirement is 2 carparks for every 3 staff employed. For the same school this would mean 26 car spaces required.
In car-crazy North Shore it is one car park per classroom and one per staff, for the same school, 70 carparks!
It gets better. Each school is required to have an outline plan under the RMA, ostensibly a central government provision to give the Ministry of Education the ability to do their own thing on school ground, so they don’t have to lodge for resource consents , but do have to apply for ‘outline plan consents’ (practically the same thing), but if the MoE wanted to, they could have their own, sensible rules. Councils could waive outlne plan requirements, but it is great revenue source, $400-1000 for every building consent in New Zealand involving schools for work of an size.
By the way a secondary school of the same size as above on the North Shore has to provide 1 car park for every 10 students over 16!
Can you see them getting the unitary plan together soon?
And the Pt. Chev Kindergarten is a marvellous 1920′s 4.8m stud naturally-lit building of great character. Bonkers!
Minimum parking requirements in Christchurch GONE and replaced with MAXIMUM parking requirements!
- light rail & dedicated cycleways
http://www1.ccc.govt.nz/council/proceedings/2011/august/cnclcover11th/13.Attachment1Volume1.pdf
From Page 100
“New commercial developments will not be required to provide minimum numbers of car parks but rather a maximum number of car parks will be included in new regulations.”
Wow, excellent…
In a parallel universe, they could make it retrospective… “Dear Westfield, your expansion in Riccarton is approved subject to you removing 1000 carparks, planting some trees, installing cycle stands, and building a tram station”…
Good, but why only commercial? So inconsistent …
I had no time to trawl the document with regards to non-commercial users.
I would hope theirs no minimum or maximum, allowing the market to find the equilibrium amount.
Westfield Riccarton needs to be regulated into integrating a mini bus exchange into their complex.
http://willu.net/wordpress/?p=93