Car parking

The crucial message from CABE's final Europan seminar was how important car parking is to the way a new development is perceived.

An audience of young architects and designers preparing to enter the Europan competition heard David Birkbeck, chief executive of campaign group Design For Homes, set out the pitfalls and solutions to accommodating cars in a new scheme.

Birkbeck was a Europan judge last year and said that parking was one of the areas where many entrants failed to convince the jury: "Car parking dominates the way we respond to housing," he said.

The problem is that in many developments people park where they want to with no regard to the needs of others, he said. Cars are left on pavements restricting the passage of pedestrians and prams, while van and even lorry drivers are increasingly being expected to take their vehicles home with them at night.

The challenge for young designers is not to get rid of cars, as car-free developments merely result in remote parking in the nearest public car park. Instead, the solution is to design streets and buildings that can accommodate vehicles in an attractive and efficient way.

Research into car parking habits shows that:

  • Bigger properties need more spaces
  • Owner-occupiers need 0.5 spaces more per property than tenants
  • There are 0.1 to 0.2 fewer cars per flat than for a house
  • Location has no effect on how many cars people own. Being next to a tube or train station has no discernible impact on the number of spaces needed

Car ownership figures per dwelling are as follows:

  • 19 per cent have no car
  • 54 per cent have one car
  • 23 per cent have two cars
  • four per cent have more than two cars

The research has concluded that:

  • Designing for two bays per dwelling suits only 23 per cent of residents
  • It is more efficient to provide unallocated spaces than specifying set spaces for each house in a development
  • The number of spaces needed by a group of 10 houses is 13 if most are allocated (10 allocated and 3 unallocated), or 11 if all are unallocated

Poundbury in Dorset was a pioneer in showing that on-street parking could be safe, popular and attractive, Birkbeck said. And he set out a number of general rules:

  • Focus on the quality of the street above all else. So where you put the parking is more significant than how much
  • There isn't a single best solution. A combination of on plot, off plot, and on street is the solution, according to location topography and the market
  • Rediscover the street as a beautiful car park - people understand how it works, it’s efficient and it increases the activity and safety of the street
  • Maximise the activity between the street and the house for safer, friendlier streets

More specific advice was to:

  • Avoid the wasteful and ugly traditional suburban layout where residents are given a 5.5 metre drive to park on
  • Provide plentiful on-street parking
  • Incorporate mews developments into the scheme to provide some residents with more private parking. But use of mews parking should support on-street provision not replace it
  • Compare the efficiency of different angles of parking. Parallel, diagonal or at right angles offer different solutions dependent on the available space
  • Make sure streets are wide enough; otherwise people will park on the pavement
  • Use trees and attractive detailing to distinguish between the road and street. It helps to make parking areas resemble a recreational space
  • Create attractive shady parking in traditional squares, similar to European villages and towns
  • Avoid allocating more than half of spaces to individual properties and discourage residents from becoming proprietorial about spaces
  • Consider the use of a stacking system - cars are left by their owner, the vehicle is then mechanically stored in a highly space-efficient way. When the owner returns it can be automatically retrieved in 45 seconds time. This system is perfect for discouraging residents from using their cars for short, unnecessary journeys
  • Put car parking underneath the home if the developer can be persuaded to meet the extra cost
  • Car clubs should be given more convenient parking spaces than private motorists if they are to prove popular with residents
  • Provide safe, secure cycle parking to all parking solutions
  • Don't forget the principles of the police-approved Secured by Design scheme

As a postscript, Matthew Turner, senior regions advisor at CABE, provided the audience with a quick recap of general guidelines to bear in mind when drawing up their designs. These were Building for Life, Lifetime Homes, and the Code for Sustainable Homes. Key steps for delivering successful housing are:

  • Understand the ecology of the site
  • Make it sustainable - provide cycle storage, drying space, water butts and on-site energy generation
  • Make it secure - refer to the Secured by Design document, make sure that spaces are overlooked, and that lighting is appropriate
  • Make the layout legible and easy to negotiate on foot
  • Ensure the site is well connected with clear through routes to places where people will wish to go
  • Design the scheme to last - an awareness of climatic conditions and the materials being used are important
  • Make it attractive - the delight in the place should be evident
  • Remember that the Europan judges are busy, powerful people who need to be seduced by your design, without you being in the room to explain your project