It’s interesting to read of yet another trader uprising opposed to proposed improvements to an Adelaide main street shopping centre.

The dispute over the Hutt Street project highlights the anxieties behind such opposition, and, again, we find that the anxiety is about parking.

Parking is one of the most significant land uses in our centres. It shapes every aspect of our place/access experience, impacts on every urban policy and imposes direct and indirect costs across the planning spectrum.

In contrast, we tend to overlook parking in our daily lives, at best viewing it narrowly from the driver’s seat and only in the last few minutes of our trip. But any threat to cheap, easy parking at the destination is met with indignation.

This sense of entitlement reflects the values and beliefs of a time when owning a car was a privilege enjoyed by a few.

In the early post-WWII period, while we were cutting and pasting our parking policies from the United States, we owned one million vehicles. Today, with 20 million vehicles to park in tens of millions of car parks, the values underpinning those mid-twentieth-century policies are largely intact.

However, while we anxiously cling to those values and that sense of entitlement, many comparable cities are rethinking parking, drawing on new technologies and innovative shared mobility economies to realise equitable and efficient parking outcomes.

Parking right outside a shop is a privilege many Adelaidians don’t want to give up. Photo: Tony Lewis

The need and the opportunity for urban parking reform in Australian cities is very clear, but the barriers are less so.

In researching my book ‘Rethinking Parking’, I looked at cities across the United States, Canada and Australia to understand the issues and the lessons in striking a better parking/place balance.

One of those lessons was to view local-level parking policy as a lever to realise big picture social, environmental and economic objectives. That big picture view justifies state legislation to empower local government to make parking policies that effectively improve place quality, access, mobility choice and affordable housing outcomes.

Critically, that shift in thinking challenges the generous subsidies that fund “free” public parking and rethinks the main street kerb as a high-value, high-access public space to enable better uses of that space for the benefit of the entire community.

The need to rethink parking is key to the success of main street centres, such as Hutt Street.

Such centres typically exist within a legible grid of streets and laneways, many of which have the potential to be transformed into green, traffic-calmed spaces that function more as connecting seams rather than dividing edges.

The need and the opportunity to improve local walking and cycling access is highlighted by the 2021 Census showing almost a third of households within Adelaide don’t have a car. That is four times the average, and those residents are almost 10 times more likely to walk to work and three times more likely to cycle than average.

Reflecting a growing trend to trade space for access, the demand for inner city living is strong with Adelaide’s CBD Plan proposing to add 50,000 new residents and 22,000 new jobs by 2036.

As residents of dense, inner-city communities are less likely to drive, they are more likely to spend their disposable income locally – tending to walk or cycle during frequent small shopping trips. While they may spend less per trip than drivers, a review of the numerous studies shows they tend to spend more overall.

They are also more likely to stay and play in that place – activating, socialising and increasing the sense of local wellbeing.

Their environmental footprint and visibility may be small, but their social and economic value is high. With less demand for parking and less traffic associated with that parking, there is more opportunity to create more accessible places that attract people to spend their time and money.

Basically, if we give drivers all the parking they want, we won’t have places worth visiting.

Putting parking on tap, not on top, requires that we look beyond the driver’s seat to see the significant opportunities for an improved main street centre experience.

Dr David Mepham is the author of Rethinking Parking: Planning and Urban Design Perspectives, published by Routledge.