Experts criticized the parking space regulation, which requires developers to set up parking spaces for cars regardless of the need, on Thursday at an online press conference of the science network “Diskurs” and “Scientists for Future”. In town centers, private cars are made more attractive than the more climate-friendly public transport, and “Austria’s most fertile soil” would be sealed around the communities. The experts call for the regulations to be strongly geared to local conditions and to set upper instead of lower limits.
The parking space obligations came from a time when the motorized mobility of the population was explicitly promoted, said Birgit Hollaus from the Institute for Law and Governance at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU). At that time, full motorization was the declared social and political goal. Today, on the other hand, climate protection must have priority.
scope for communities
According to Hollaus, the number of parking spaces is determined by the state governments according to the number of residential units or the square meters for trade and commerce. However, the municipalities have some leeway to deviate up or down.
In Lower Austria, they could change the specifications according to “local needs”, but this only means an increase. In Vienna, the number of mandatory parking spaces is likely to be reduced by up to 90 percent, and in Upper Austria you can arrange both more and fewer parking spaces. “There it is therefore open to provide fewer parking spaces for climate protection reasons,” she said.
Comfortable private transport
According to Harald Frey from the Institute for Transport Sciences at the Technical University (TU) Vienna, the parking space ordinance gives private transport an additional convenience advantage over public transport.
“In the average urban environment, a stop 400 meters away is less than 20 percent attractive compared to a parking space in the underground car park, in the house or in front of the house.” If a parking space is available and easily accessible, people also ride along routes well-developed public transport, preferably by private car.
“If you want to create equal opportunities between public transport and the car, central garages have to be created at the same distance as the stops of frequently used transport,” he said.
Expert: set upper limits by law
In addition, upper limits for parking spaces per property should be set by law, as is done in Switzerland, for example. The expert criticized that the same number of parking spaces had to be built everywhere, regardless of whether there was a good connection to public transport or not.
“We build past the need,” said Frey. In some places up to 70 percent of the garages and parking spaces are unused. That would also make housing more expensive and thus create social problems. As a positive example, he named the city of St. Pölten, where the “serving quantities” are geared towards public transport. In the center, developers have to construct fewer parking spaces than in the periphery.
“We build the most fertile soil in Austria”
Johannes Tintner-Olifiers from the Institute for Statistics at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna said that the enormous use of land for the infrastructure, which was promoted in the second half of the 20th century to promote prosperity, was at the expense of agricultural, forestry and nature conservation areas : “One obviously had the impression that the space is unlimited, which is of course not true.”
“In Austria, we primarily use the country’s most fertile soil for infrastructure and building land,” says Tintner-Olifiers. This is almost irreversible, because sealed areas cannot be quickly converted back into good agricultural land even by “unsealing”. In addition, climate-damaging carbon would be released during construction, regardless of whether the area was previously forest, grassland or arable land.
Compensatory levy: Money from parking spaces for “public transport”
According to Birgit Hollaus, the parking space ordinances also stipulate that financial compensation payments are due if the required number of parking spaces cannot be built. However, they would usually be used to concrete alternative parking areas elsewhere. In Lower Austria and Vienna, for example, this could also be used to promote local passenger transport. “In this way, the compensatory levy can contribute to the greening of local transport.”
