NEVER MISS A POST (and get our Local Parking Assessment tool)

email address SUBSCRIBE

Join 727 other subscribers

HOME RESOURCES BASICS AUTHORS ABOUT Search SEARCH

BLOG ARCHIVE
Hong Kong has parking minimums AND very
expensive parking. How can that be? ► 2017 ( 3 )

► 2016 ( 7 )

By Paul Barter - Tuesday, November 26, 2013

► 2015 ( 6 )
I recently stumbled across some information that resolved a Hong Kong parking mystery.
Hooray! ► 2014 ( 15 )

▼ 2013 ( 18 )
Err. You didn't know there was a mystery about Hong Kong
► December ( 1 )
parking? I had better explain.
▼ November ( 3 )
Singapore and Hong Kong both have big reputations for
Hong Kong has parking minimums AND
restraining car ownership and car use.
very expensive ...

But there is a puzzle. Parking minimums in TODs (part 1)

The Unglamorous Secret to Parking Success

Singapore's explicit travel demand management (TDM)
efforts are much more severe than Hong Kong's, yet they
► October ( 1 )
are apparently less effective.
► September ( 2 )
Hong Kong's car ownership (about 60 cars per 1000
► August ( 2 )
people) is much lower than Singapore's (about 110 cars
per 1000) and its public transport mode share much ► July ( 1 )
higher. Singapore has around 3 times more private car
kilometres of travel per person than Hong Kong. (Thanks Jeff Kenworthy - pdf) ► June ( 2 )

► May ( 2 )
Hong Kong's expensive parking is probably part of the answer to this puzzle.
► March ( 1 )
But why does Hong Kong has such expensive parking?
► February ( 2 )

At those densities, of course parking is expensive, you say? High land prices mean expensive ► January ( 1 )
parking, right?

► 2012 ( 36 )
Not so fast. High urban densities DON'T always result in high parking prices.
► 2011 ( 21 )
Just look at Mumbai or Cairo. These cities remind us that parking prices can be low even in
► 2010 ( 47 )
dense cities with expensive real-estate.

By contrast, there is no doubt that Hong Kong has expensive parking.

It is not just daytime CBD parking that is expensive. Home-based residential parking is usually
also very expensive. Part of that may be property speculation. But even so-called bubble-priced
parking is still delivering a yield of about 4 percent so speculation is not the whole story.

Even residential parking in the public housing estates is expensive.

For example when I looked in 2009, parking for tenants at Lek Yuen
Estate in Sha Tin was HK$1,350 (or more than US$170) per month.

OK. So maybe Hong Kong restricts parking supply as part of its

transit-oriented urban transport strategy?

Um. No again. Hong Kong actually has surprisingly conventional

parking policy.

Tweets by @ReinventParking
That is what we found, to our surprise, in the ADB study that led to
'Parking Policy in Asian Cities'. Hong Kong has conventional
minimum parking requirements (and no parking maximums).
Powered by Blogger.

The minimums are much lower than in the USA but they are higher
than those of Japanese cities or Beijing.

Hong Kong parking requirements are actually similar to Singapore's. But mysteriously, Hong
Kong parking is much more expensive than Singapore's.

So we do have a mystery here.

Why are parking prices so high if Hong Kong parking policy now tries to meet "demand"?

Doesn't the conventional approach to parking, with its minimum parking requirements, always
pump too much parking into a city?

Based on Hong Kong, the answer seems to be, no, not necessarily. But why not?

I already had a plausible guess before the recent discovery mentioned above. If we assume
parking minimums were absent from Hong Kong before a certain date, then market prices for
parking could have risen as car ownership rose without parking construction keeping pace.

This was a hyper-dense city after all with rapidly improving mass transit, so developers might
happily build with very little parking, I guessed.

Then at some point, we know that Hong Kong did embark on a conventional approach to parking
policy. It would have done so with a context of high parking prices and limited parking supply.

Now consider how Hong Kong would have set the new parking minimums.

They required estimates of parking demand.

But parking demand in Hong Kong was very low when parking minimums were first imposed.
This low demand was shaped by pre-existing high parking prices in highly transit-oriented
landscapes, not to mention low car ownership.

It seems that the parking minimums were set rather low, based on that low demand. Even for
new areas. The prevailing prices seem to have been taken as a given. So the new parking
mandates did not exert (much) downward pressure on prices. (There is a longer story here, for
another day.)

In addition, don't forget that parking requirements only apply to new development and
redevelopment. So, even with Hong Kong's rapidly changing skyline there are still many 1970s
buildings around and any injection of new parking supply is gradual.

And Hong Kong uses some flexibility in applying its parking mandates. There are
significant reductions in the most transit-oriented locations. Parking supply can be restricted if
the traffic impacts would be excessive. Small-scale street-side retail is usually exempt.

So Hong Kong's shift to a more-or-less conventional parking policy didn't cause low parking
prices nor excessive supply (as far as I can tell).

But what parking policies came before the current conventional one?

Without knowing that, I wasn't as certain of the narrative above as I would have liked.

I had assumed that before parking standards were introduced perhaps there had been a laissez
faire approach to parking.

This is where the new information mentioned at the beginning of the article comes in.

Hong Kong actually aggressively restricted residential parking supply in the 1970s. It seems to
have had strict maximums (at least for residential development) before it had minimums.

Parking was a key tool, perhaps THE key tool of that period, aimed at restricting car ownership
growth.

I hadn't realized this until I stumbled across this insight (under point 2.5) on a site outlining a
1997 complaint about private residential parking from the Hong Kong Consumer Council.

For traffic control purposes, the declared policy of the Government has been to restrain
private car ownership. Prior to 1981, the Government attained this by restricting the
provision of residential parking spaces. The Government later adopted fiscal measures to
restrict the growth in private car ownership.

And, to confirm, here is the relevant Statement of Intent from the Hong Kong Planning Standards
and Guidelines 1992 edition issued by the Planning Department, explaining the switch to a
conventional parking policy and the shift away from restricting parking supply:

Parking standards for residential development were formulated in the light of the
introduction of fiscal measures to restrict directly the rate of growth in private vehicle
ownership and the abandonment of restraint on car ownership by a restriction of
residential parking spaces. The overall intention of the standards is to ensure that, except
in special cases, future residential developments should have sufficient parking provision
to match the current and anticipated car ownership of residents. Generally, therefore,
minimum rather than maximum standards are set. This should enable developers to be
aware from outset of the extent of parking provision they can plan. [My emphasis]

So parking supply was deliberately restricted with housing built in 1970s especially and up
until 1981.

And the impact of this would have been large, since there must have been a huge amount of
residential construction in the 1970s.

Hong Kong's population rose from 3,995,400 in 1970 to 5,109,812 in 1981. And the 1970s was
(mostly) a time of rapid economic growth in Hong Kong. So a large increment of Hong Kong
housing took place with very low rates of parking.

I don't have the full story but I suspect that this policy began in the early 1970s. But even before
that I imagine that most high-rise housing in Hong Kong was built with little or no parking, since
car ownership was tiny in that era.

Why does all this matter? I can think of several reasons. Can you?

But for now just let me summarize how the points in this post have helped clear up the puzzle
about Singapore versus Hong Kong.

open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com
 As mentioned at the top of this post, it is surprising that although Singapore's car restrictions
are more severe than Hong Kong's, car ownership and use in Singapore are much higher.

Part of the answer is Hong Kong's extreme urban density (about 3 times Singapore's) which
helps enable excellent public transport service levels.

But Hong Kong's expensive parking must also be important. And I had assumed expensive
parking was a result of conscious and current policy in Hong Kong.

But that assumption was shaken by finding that Hong Kong's parking policies today are
conventional with parking minimums, and little different from Singapore's. Contemporary
parking policy in Hong Kong couldn't explain its high parking prices.

How perplexing.

But now I think I understand how Hong Kong can have parking minimums AND very
expensive parking. Any objections?

SHARE Tweet Share EMAIL

NEWER POST OLDER POST

RELATED ARTICLES:

0 COMMENTS :
POST A COMMENT

Enter your comment...

Singapore parking policy in need of... Deliberate parking crunch in Singap...

Comment as: Select profile...

Publish Preview

Singapore's Today newspaper on my p...

#BlackFridayParking Adaptive Parking ADB Asian parking study alternatives analogies anti-car Argentina Asia
Australia Bangladesh basics best practice resources blight blogs Brazil Canada China Colombia commons goods
competition contingency-based planning convertible space corruption cruising for parking data design Dhaka enforcement
Unless otherwise noted, all content on
equity Europe event
Reinventing Parking is licensed under a Creative
informal parking guards international comparisons Japan Korea Latin America links locus of responsibility
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
market-oriented
Malaysia approach maximums Meta Mexico minimum parking NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
requirements minimums abolitionists mode-neutral motivations motorcycles Nairobi New Zealand on-
street opportunity cost overpricing oversupply paradigms park-and-ride PARK(ing) Day parking as real-
estate parking management payment systems pedestrian impacts performance pricing performance-
pricing Philippines presentation price regulation prices pricing mechanisms private operators privatization proof-of-
reserving parking
spots residential
saturation SFPark Shoup Singapore site mission social media space consumption spillover stakeholder
compromise Strong Towns subsidies success-without-excess surface parking Taiwan TDM Thailand TOD toilet
requirements UK unbundling under-priced USA vacant lots video Vietnam webinar zoning

Adapted from GoGreen Theme Designed by Templateism used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

open in browser PRO version Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API pdfcrowd.com