Australians are buying and driving bigger cars – despite the high cost of fuel – and the standard size of parking spaces and the adequacy of multi-level carparks is becoming a problem.
Planners fear carparks are at risk of collapse under the weight of increasingly enormous vehicles and longer vehicles are creating potential problems as they hang over allocated spaces.
The Guardian reports that over the past few decades, the standard size for car spaces on streets and in parking lots has been 5.4 metres long and 2.4 to 2.6 metres wide – big enough to allow a Ford Falcon or Holden Commodore to park comfortably.
But Standards Australia is proposing increasing the required length in off-street lots by 20cm.
Australia’s most popular car is the Toyota HiLux dual cab ute, which is about 5.27 metres long – giving it less than 15cm of breathing space in average parking spots.
Some vans and SUVs are even longer, but the authority says that basing the standard on the HiLux and Ford Ranger would be representative of at least 85 per cent of registered vehicles.
Marion Terrill, the transport and cities director at the Grattan Institute, says the switch would normalise the buying of big vehicles when the government should be nudging people in the opposite direction.
Do you own a big vehicle? Do you have trouble parking? Should parking spaces be made larger?
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