Project Information
Purpose
Why bother mapping station carparks?
At present, there isn't that much information about carparks at railway stations in Melbourne.
This map and the associated data are meant to help show the location and amount of car parking in metropolitan Melbourne.
Results
Take a look at the map and you can see some interesting things going on.
One of the visually obvious things is the almost complete absence of any significant carparks in inner Melbourne. Footscray seems to have the closest large carpark (i.e. over 100 spaces) to the CBD. Otherwise, stations within a 4-5 kilometre radius of the CBD have no or minimal carparking spots. The Sandringham Line shows this well, with no decidated carparks at any station closer to the city than Elsternwick.
One possible explanation for this is the presence of old railway stations in parts of the city developed before the post-war suburban boom. These stations were built before private cars existed or were popularised and consequently did not have any carparks.
All told, there are 40,008 parking spaces dedicated to railway stations across metropolitan Melbourne.
This figure does not include on-street parking, car parks at nearby facilities such as shopping centres, or any other areas available near railway stations. This is also data from 2014 and numbers have changed over the past two years.
Taking the standard area of a parallel parking space in Victoria as 12.74 metres squared (as defined by the Victorian Planning Scheme), this comes to 509,701.92 square metres of space dedicated to car parking at railway stations.
As with the total number, this figure is only a rough calculation and does not include accessways, roads or other car-related infrastructure around stations. It also assumes that all spaces are parallel, which is obviously not the case.
This number is almost certainly an underestimate of the total amount of space dedicated to carparking.
In any case, you can see the raw data for yourself using the 'data' tab above..
What I used to make this map