The Eternal Complaint vs the Intractable Problem.
Jack Fairey
‘Whenever students of demonology get together, the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for Exhibit A.
Where they go wrong, of course, is in assuming that the wretched road is evil simply because of the incredible carnage and frustration it engenders every day.
In fact, very few people on the face of the planet know that the very shape of the M25 forms the sign Odegra in the language of the Black Priesthood of Ancient Mu, and means “Hail the Great Beast, Devourer of Worlds.” The thousands of motorists who daily fume their way around its serpentine lengths have the same effect as water on a prayer wheel, grinding out an endless fog of low-grade evil to pollute the metaphysical atmosphere for scores of miles around’
-Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchet – Good Omens
Many will be familiar with parking at UWA as a broadly unpleasant experience. If one arrives too late, one trundles aimlessly around in one’s car, seemingly for hours, looking for a space. Often spaces are only found in the far reaches of campus, sometimes in other UWA campuses, such as Podiatry or Nedlands, perhaps not on campus at all. Broadway Shopping Centre complains of students clogging their bays, the Guild implores us to avoid parking there, and so students scrounge spaces from family members in adjacent streets. The dread of being unable to find a space, of slowly watching the clock tick down until you’re late for your lecture, causes a great eternal scream to fly out from the mouths of students: why don’t they just build some more fucking parking?
Well, unfortunately, this is a problem that’s yet to be solved and likely can’t be. Before trying to understand traffic dynamics, we first need to understand the ‘Jevons Paradox’. This describes a situation where increasing efficiency also increases overall consumption of a resource. Sensitivity to price decreases may lead to buying a greater quantity of goods, so great, in fact, that while inputs for said goods are used more efficiently, the amount of goods in demand increases total consumption. A good example is fuel usage; cars that become more fuel efficient and cheaper to run actually increase the number of cars on the road, meaning we’ll need more fuel than when gas was gulped to run our fleet.
Roads suffer a more specifically named paradox, based on the same idea; The Downs-Thomson Paradox refers specifically to an aggravating tendency in traffic infrastructure:
The more you expand the roads, the more people use them, and traffic ultimately stays the same.
Creating efficiency doesn’t make it better for everyone already on the road; it incites people who would’ve used other means of transport to hop in a car and clog the road, meaning the road reaches its capacity and becomes just as congested as before. This ‘induced demand’ for road infrastructure brings it back into an equilibrium: every car journey will, for an average commute, take just as long as public transport, given a long enough span to adjust.
This is inescapable given a large enough population on a popular enough route. If either were faster, they’d be swarmed. And if public transport doesn’t pick up speed, it’s impossible to get traffic moving any faster.
We’ll return to that concept in a direct sense later, applied to infrastructure surrounding UWA. But it’s somewhat apparent how a similar effect plays out with parking; Build it and they will come, and every new bay built makes car-travel more effective and efficient, convincing two people to give up the train. Imagine a Babylonian tower with a voluminous parking space; not only would this cost an enormous amount, it would also be futile. It would struggle to create enough space; every student with enough money or generous parents would pile in to find a spot. Darren from Dalkeith is suddenly not bothered to hop on the bus. Mary from Maddington who, deserving as she may be of a parking place, had refrained till now, may think that even though she can only get there at 10am, she might find a space. Look to your left in a lecture. Look to your right. Look at the Guild membership, which hit 30,000 recently. UWA says 25,000 people are enrolled in some form of study on the Crawley campus, and for every twenty of those people there’s a tutor. Think, is there really room for every single person on campus to park? Will there ever be? Sadly, it seems to be an insurmountable challenge.
‘Wait!’ you may say, ‘not everyone will want to drive anyway, maybe there are ways to keep enough people out of parking for it to stay plentiful’. You’d be right! Sadly, this is an article devoid of optimism or a sunny disposition. Unfortunately for the student base, economics comes into play. The only way to dissuade someone from pleasure is pain. Often financial.
A keen-eyed observer will have noticed that, according to UWA, January first marked a shift in parking policy; ‘Pay-as-you-go’ (PAYG) policies have been implemented to make students more aware of parking costs, and to raise the price itself. An old guild petition from 2020 remarks that ‘two-thirds of university students live below the poverty line – [PAYG] will disproportionately affect students from low SES backgrounds, non-metro areas, and those with high course attendance requirements or caring responsibilities.’
The student rate of three dollars per day (not cheap considering it amounts to two-hundred-and-seventy dollars a year for a student with a three-day week) isn’t even offered to students from a swathe of postcodes. Some of these are reasonable: 6008 – Subiaco is a bikeable distance and therefore reasonable to exclude. However, in carving off chunks of the population in the name of stemming the parking issues, postcodes like 6018 (Woodlands/Churchlands up to Karrinyup) and 6158 (East Fremantle) are also excluded. These are areas with wildly varying access to public transport – bus coverage is spotty at best in large parts. If people from these postcodes were to park, they’d have to pay fifteen-dollars-eighty a day.
This system sucks, and its punitive towards you, the students, people who are worst placed to afford it. Regrettably, it’s necessary. This system of restriction and cost is necessary to dissuade the people on the fringes, even if it catches innocents in the sweep.
Returning to traffic infrastructure, there’s another unintentional cost to parking: the traffic itself. UWA is serviced by two main arteries: Winthrop Ave from the North, and Stirling Highway/Mounts Bay Road from East to West. These roads are congested dual carriageways without any room to expand. Not only do they take traffic from UWA, but also from QEII medical 
centre, which, in 2012, (before the Children’s Hospital opening) attracted five thousand staff and twenty thousand vehicle trips a day.
UWA has roughly four thousand two hundred bays in service. If it were to more than double this number to ten thousand (which would be infrastructurally complex and still not provide even half of the student base), it would draw in over five thousand more cars at aminimum throughout the day. This is taxing for any road network, but the intersections around UWA are fraught with existing traffic; Hackett Drive hosts the greatest outpouring of UWA traffic and is frequently found only thinking of moving sometime later during rush hour. The Broadway/Hampden Rd/Stirling Highway intersection is similarly languid and accompanied by the Winthrop Ave/Mts Bay Rd intersection three hundred metres away, which is sometimes the smoothest of the three (clearing an exceptionally low bar for the title). Graphs prepared from Main Roads data finds that (admittedly a combination of various days and times across multiple years) traffic flows can get up to 5,000 cars an hour in the predominant direction, with the three combined barely falling below 3,000 total at any point during the working day.
These traffic volumes aren’t at maximum capacity, it is potentially feasible to have a few more cars on the road. But they aren’t far away, and the grueling drive down Mounts Bay Rd at 5pm is already something no-one should have to endure.
UWA is not well situated to receive any greater traffic flow than already exists and cannot cope with the expanded capacity of parking that would enable everyone to find a spot.
There’s little to no room for improvement either; Mounts Bay Rd is built already on reclaimed land and cannot expand past the bottlenecks under the Narrows Bridge and Swan River Brewery. Stirling Highway is hemmed by businesses and Nedlands City Council attitudes, making it unlikely to face significant expansion. The only road capable of expansion, at a great loss to road-side trees and the central island, is Winthrop Ave, but it alone couldn’t cope with the increased demand. Any works would cause likely years of disruption and only achieve the old status quo at best, and it wouldn’t touch the east-west corridor that would suffer the most.
In summary, it’s something of a dismal landscape. UWA has a parking problem that really can’t be solved. The student population will only continue to grow, and parking simply can’t. UWA’s 2000 Campus Plan caps parking at just over four thousand two hundred bays on any future development. This was judged feasible in conjunction with the WA Planning Commission. Recent reviews recommend that parking is maintained at a ‘practical minimum’. Building new accommodations on the Nedlands Campus Carpark will only create the same amount of parking elsewhere, as mentioned in their planning documents. Parking can neither be created or destroyed it seems, only transferred.
Indubitably, the system could use changing as it’s regressive to charge students for parking, even if it costs more for the university not to. Alternative distribution systems might provide those who genuinely need parking the same access for free, rather than making them pay to prove they need it. For example, a more specific permit system that analyses distance from feasible public transit routes based on specific addresses. Price mechanisms are an effective sorter of need sometimes, but when your demographic is so cash-strapped and sensitive to prices? Perhaps not. Something like a sorting hat would be a costly program to build, but one that’s adjustable, enduring, and fair. Perhaps.
This is the kind of thing worth pushing for; all the University has to offer are redistributive measures, as supply and demand are constrained and controlled by factors outside their remit.
Policies sometimes get thrown around; ‘Ban First Years from Parking’ for instance, is gratifying to the voting public (all of whom would of course escape the ire of such a policy), while ultimately shifting an injustice around like silt in a pond, heaping it onto the unsuspecting new fish.
So, what is the solution? It’s all too easy to rip to shreds the possibility of any parking reform, and indeed, it does seem like a stifling situation.
But there’s a ray of distant hope in the clouds – clouds hovering over Perth City and Parliament House, not the Chancellery. Public transport is the only way out of this pickle, and ultimately, most congested situations. More of it, more often, to and from more places, for less, is the only way to calm traffic, ease parking, and make campus easier to access. Too often, public transport can be forgotten as the core of any transport system; it should be that cars are a supplement for edge cases, yet they’ve become the norm (why do I hear of electric cars in tunnels when I should only hear of trains?).
The City of Perth has tried to improve the situation, as has the State Government and Transperth. Trains are indirect modes of transport to UWA, so intermediary buses are frequent; the 950, 995, and Purple Cat mean that there’s a bus to UWA every few minutes, most hours of the day from Perth’s central train hub. This is an excellent step forward, keeping many students off the road and providing many students with their daily means of transport. But there’s room to improve. For instance, providing buses with priority lanes, even at the cost of cars, can accelerate transport times substantially, improving reliability and increasing uptake. These efforts may help the attendees of QEII hospital. Reliability would be a key concern for shift workers who bite their nails about their daily commute, which hinges entirely on a single bus getting a clean run and coming on time.
Additionally, the Ferry program has been expanded. A new terminal in Applecross will be built, across from a terminal in Matilda Bay. This garners some controversy and will no doubt cause an issue with sailing clubs when lumbering ferries across their start lines, potentially endangering their sailors. However, it may provide a more direct route than the Mandurah line, and shave huge amounts of time from the commutes of many students south of the river. If adequately supported by a spider-web of feeder bus routes and adequately staffed by enough ferries to run every ten minutes at its peak, it may prove successful in alleviating large amounts of traffic and solving a large portion of the parking problem.
Parking is an indirect problem. It’s often thought of as a cause rather than a symptom, but that’s only because we can see it. One doesn’t see the intricacies of road networks that sprawl behind every full lot and the choices made by every driver who parked there, and so the issue boils down to the only parking space or point that matters; the one extra space that should’ve been there for me.