Parking spaces in Australia may soon become bigger as a response to the nation’s love affair with SUVs and large cars, but planners fear parking lots are at risk of collapse under the weight of increasingly enormous vehicles.
For 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 has proposed increasing the required length in off-street lots by 20cm.
It would be the first change since 1993, when a new Ford Falcon was about 1.86 metres wide and 4.92 metres long.
Today, 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 – approaching 6 metres – but the authority determined that basing the standard on the HiLux and Ford Ranger would be representative of at least 85% of Australian registered vehicles.
“Analysis showed there were significant increases in the length and width of the fleet,” the proposal for the updated standard says.
The proposal has already proved controversial, with a flood of comments on the consultation webpage urging against the longer standard.
Marion Terrill, the transport and cities director at the Grattan Institute, said that while Standards Australia’s proposal “is just reflecting what’s happening” on roads, there were better ways to respond to the trend.
“This normalises the behaviour of buying these enormous vehicles when instead the government should be nudging people in the opposite direction, especially as we are increasingly understanding the negative effects of larger vehicles,” Terrill said.
She suggested making only some parking bays bigger, creating an incentive for smaller cars.
Citing a variety of tax perks for SUVs and utes, Terrill said: “We’re already encouraging big vehicles and this [making car spots larger] would just be another thing in that direction.
“There shouldn’t be an arms race to get even bigger vehicles.”
She said larger vehicles made pedestrians, cyclists and drivers of small cars less safe, as well as simply taking up more room on the road.
David Mepham, an urban planner specialising in parking and author of the book Rethinking Parking, said car parks were not structurally equipped to bear the weight of the most popular vehicles.
A 1993 Ford Falcon weighed about 1.4 tonnes, compared with just over 2 tonnes for a 2023 Toyota HiLux.
More alarming is the weight of electric vehicles. Large batteries can mean some EVs are more than a tonne heavier than their combustion-engine counterparts.
“Our car parks aren’t structurally safe for our heavier cars,” Mepham said. He has urged a wholesale review of car park attitudes in Australia and recommends ultimately building fewer of them to nudge commuters on to public and active transport.
Mepham accepted that standards must reflect the cars on Australian roads.
“Is it smart to accommodate … people … making what I consider to be silly decisions about cars and then demanding we change the urban environment to accommodate their decision? No. But you have to be pragmatic too,” he said.
Australia’s love affair with large cars
More than 50% of new vehicles sold in the country last year were SUVs, a share that has almost doubled over the past decade.
Two-thirds of new vehicle sales in Australia last year were SUVs, 4WDs or light commercial vehicles – a category that includes utes. These categories also accounted for eight of the top 10 bestselling models in 2022, according to Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries data.
A decade ago the top-selling vehicle was the Toyota Corolla. It still makes the top 10 but other sedans and hatchbacks, including the Holden Commodore, the Ford Falcon and the Mazda 3 are long gone.
They have been replaced by a wide range of 4WDs, SUVs and utes. Just two of the top 10 bestselling cars in 2022 do not fit into these categories.
A range of tax perks have been linked with the rise in SUV and dual cab ute sales, particularly the instant asset write-off scheme. The threshold for that will drop from $150,000 to $20,000 this financial year.
Thinktanks including the Grattan Institute and the Australia Institute, and various transport academics, have also identified fringe benefits tax, temporary full expensing policy and the loss carry-back tax offset as tax perks that bring larger vehicles within reach for more Australians, especially for small business owners.
Carmakers have doubled how much they spend advertising SUVs and utes to Australians over the past decade, according to analysis by the climate advocacy group Comms Declare.
Surging SUV ownership has meant Australians are needlessly spending an extra $13bn a year to fuel their cars, the Australia Institute found, and that the trend is sending carbon emissions from transport into overdrive.
Studies have found that children involved in a fatal crash are eight times more likely to have been struck by an SUV than a standard car.
Prof Stuart Newstead, the director of Monash University’s Accident Research Centre, worked on a study in 2020 that found the road death toll was inflated by 5% purely from people choosing to buy four-wheel-drive utes and large SUVs, despite not needing their power or size for the routes they drive.
In May, he told the Guardian that the 5% figure was now considerably higher due to increased sales patterns in the past few years.
“Our propensity to buy these vehicles is driving road safety backwards,” Newstead said.
