Melbourne's growing reliance on cars is at odds with its multi-billion-dollar investment in public transport, according to an RMIT urban policy professor who says the city needs to rethink the vast areas of land devoted to parking around suburban railway stations.
📍 Land wasted: Professor Jago Dodson said train stations including Ringwood, Ringwood East, Croydon and Mooroolbark had substantial areas devoted to car parking, reflecting Melbourne's reliance on driving to access the rail network.
🗣️ “Car parking is pretty low value,” he told the Eastern Melburnian. “We’re building multi-billion-dollar rail infrastructure and then combining it with the automobile, which is a mode that we're trying to reduce to try and reduce competition with our train network. It doesn't make a lot of sense to be building high-quality rail infrastructure … and then providing car parking around them.”
🅿️ Parking pressures: As part of the Suburban Rail Loop East project, a number of high-rise car parking buildings have been proposed across the east – including a multi-level car park in Glen Waverley to replace the removal of 400 parking spaces to make way for the new station construction.
The issue will become even more important as the SRL East is developed, according to Dodson, with new high-density station precincts potentially generating more traffic if large amounts of car parking are built alongside them.
🗣️ “A city of about 10 million by 2050 that’s operating at about 70 percent of travellers by car is going to be not a particularly livable city, especially if we've made it high-density as well,” he said. “If we’ve got 25 years to get things right, then we need to be changing and accelerating our plans immediately.”
📣 Government responses: The State Government’s overall stance on the project’s reliance on cars is that it would reduce it over time, but infrastructure is needed initially to cope with those who still need to drive to the new stations.
According to statements from the Suburban Rail Loop Authority, the SRL would see 600,000 cars taken off the road. From 2035, the SRLA will also impose a car parking fee for permanent owners of these off-street car parking spaces, which is set to return about $800,000 of funding back.
Responding to questions from the Age in March 2025, former Monash mayor Paul Klisaris said the council acknowledged new station precincts would still need to cater to private vehicle trips.
“Council supports SRL precincts as being areas where people have various transport options,” he said. “This must include better connections to other public transport options and improvements to active transport infrastructure in and around station precincts.”
Monash council recently doubled the capacity of its Bogong Avenue car park in Glen Waverley to more than 1,000 spaces.
🚍 The missing links: According to Dodson, the current bus system includes “slow and inconvenient” routes which wind through backstreets and are often not well integrated with the rail network, including timetables not lining up seamlessly.
Dodson said a better way to connect people to the rail network would be “providing a better metropolitan-level, integrated, co-ordinated bus, tram and rail network”.