At a recent Christmas Function I spoke with a former colleague of mine who now works with NSW Planning & Infrastructure, and took the opportunity to briefly discuss her Department’s Policy with regard to visitors’ carspaces in Strata Developments.
She advised that the Department was only concerned to ensure that the carpark design, such as its turning paths, driveway widths, and ramp grades, meets the Australian Standards, and that visitors’ carspaces comply with Guidelines that relate only to the means to calculate the numbers of such carspaces to be provided for in the design, and not how they’re used post completion of the Development.
Give the extent of Strata Developments in the pipeline, the Department has (or will) mandate a range of controls for Councils and Private Certifiers to follow in yet another State Environmental Planning Policy (SEPP), which will of course include carpark design and the minimum numbers of visitors’ carspaces to be provided.
Interestingly, my former colleague made reference to the fact that in order to comply with open space ratios, some Developers were lobbying for Strata Developments with no off-street visitor parking at all, and on the other extreme a strata owners association whose title she couldn’t recall (after all, the Function had been in progress for a couple of hours) was suggesting that parking areas for Resident Owners and for short-term Residents (i.e. tenants?) should be segregated.
No doubt parking with remain one of those 3 “P’s” that are the bane of Owners Corporations, but from what my former colleague informs me NSW Planning & Infrastructure has no interest in how the visitors’ carspaces designed into Strata Developments are used post completion of the Building, and I’d suggest (but not deny) that most Councils wouldn’t either so long as the numbers required under the SEPP and as reflected in their Development Control Plans, now as low as 0.2 visitor carspaces per Lot, is complied with at the time of approval.
So it looks like By-Law 2 will become surplus to the requirements of Owners Corporations in many new Strata Developments, because there won’t be any visitors carspaces!