I live in Adelaide, South Australia. I live in the North Eastern Suburbs, a pretty comfortable walking distance from a major shopping and transportation hub that is called Tea Tree Plaza. Across the road, there's a large hospital.
At Tea Tree Plaza, there's a large mall, a gym, restaurants, and an incredibly large bus terminal, where buses pretend to be trains, by driving on this thing that is called an O-Bahn.
A Bus pretending to be a train, on the Adelaide OBahn, from Wikimedia Commons: rights wholly released on Monday May 22 2006 by Beneaththelandslide.
The O-Bahn is a big deal, because it is a bus way that gets you from the suburbs to the city in a fraction of the time the road network would take you. Compared to local buses, you're saving about 15-20 minutes on a commute.
Next to the bus terminal, there's a large, multi-storey carpark, designed to allow commuters to drive to the terminal, park, then grab the O-Bahn, "I'm a train" bus to the city. You pay $2 to park your car; if you used a bus ticket, charged on your exit from the car park.
With the massive shopping district, hospital, and other amenities in the area, not everyone wants to pay that $2 to park near the terminal. If people park in Tea Tree Plaza's car park, they would get fined for being there for greater than a certain number of hours.
Meanwhile, local streets become cluttered with cars parking as close as they can to the terminal, creating issues for the local residents and streets, apparently.
The owners of Tea Tree Plaza wanted to enforce paid parking for the mall, to help out with the "availability" of parking, ie, a user pays system. The state government said "no sorry," and bi-laterally supported a bill to not enable paid parking.
This is probably a good thing, but wait until you hear what happens next.
The government proposes that they construct a new multi story car park to expand capacity by 500 car parks at their "Park and Ride" structure.
The cost? 43.5 million dollars.
Let's do some basic mathematics.
Cost per car parking bay:
43,500,000 / 500 = 87,0000
Cost to park for 1 day
$ 2
Days in a Year
365
87,000 (Cost Per Park) / 2 (Cost Per Day) = 43,500 (Uses per Car Park to break even)
43,500 / 365
A Staggering 119 YEARS to break even.
Sure, prices will increase as inflation devalues currency; but this is an assumption that the structure will require zero maintenance over that period, uses zero electricity, and also is occupied at least once by a vehicle in every car park, every single day of the year.
This will simply not be the case.
My mind is blown, and I don't understand how a project such as this is financially responsible, useful to the community; or in line with maintaining the ageing O-Bahn link that this structure is being built to support.