IntroPTAL6

Two final thoughts

Planning policy time horizon

If you were in charge of your local council planning policy and could set the car parking requirements for all new residential developments within your area? Would you allow developers to build houses with the parking space that people say they “want” today? Or, given that houses built today will likely remain in use for the next 50 or 100 years, would you impose car parking policies aligned to what people will “need” in 10 or 20 years from now?

Maybe, we should respect that the planners have our best (long term) interests in mind?

New house purchaser expectations

Maybe it is not the national planning framework, TfL, the local council , developers or architects that are at fault when the available parking falls woefully short of that required by the residents of a new residential development? Maybe the families that purchase the new houses have the wrong expectations? We are all human, and sometimes we unintentionally get it wrong:-

Parking within new housing developments is very often set-up as 1 garage space and 1 hard standing space to the front of the garage. A family could see this parking arrangement as perfectly adequate for their 2 cars. However, once they move into their new house, the garage, for whatever reason, is not used to park a car. So the 2nd car needs to go somewhere?
Potential purchasers properly assess the parking that is available for their new house. This might include a designated parking space, or a garage. The family buys the house knowing that they will need 1 of 2 extra parking spaces and will have decided that these extra spaces are available in a close-by overflow parking area. However, a large proportion of the families that have bought the neighbouring houses formed the same expectations of parking their additional cars in the overflow parking area. The result is that far too many families with multiple cars compete for the limited overflow parking spaces.

Maybe we should do much more to ensure that those considering the purchase of a new development fully understand the potential parking issues?

By Geoff James

Parking considerations for new developments

Cont..

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