Parking in Ireland can vary greatly between urban and rural areas. This guide provides essential information on parking rules, signage interpretation, and tips for both city and countryside parking.
Whether you're a resident or a visitor, these guidelines will help you steer through parking spaces efficiently and avoid common issues.
The Size and Impact of Parking Spaces in Ireland
Let’s just take that figure of ten million car parking spaces and run with it for a while. All put together, that would create an area of approximately 110 square kilometres sq - roughly the same size as Dublin City. That’s a lot of space and a lot of space which lies vacant a lot of the time.
They also represent a significant cost to society. Large retail spaces, such as shopping centres, will often allocate as much space for parking as the retail units themselves. Office buildings sometimes come with an underground car park – which almost always remains empty at night and the weekend. Add to that efficient parking controls and the increasing adoption of electric vehicles, and the need for traditional parking is reduced even more.
The Cost of Parking in Dublin
According to updated listings on Daft.ie, the cost of a parking space in the centre of Dublin can vary, with some locations looking for up to €300+ per month. If multiple spaces are required for employees, the total expense can quickly escalate into tens or even hundreds of thousands of euros annually, depending on the number of spaces rented.
The Effect of Covid-19 on Parking Spaces
And that’s before we even start to look at an event as seismic as the Covid-19 pandemic which shattered the status quo of how we work. With almost everything shuttered for months, the number of car parking spaces - along with vast amounts of office space - went completely unused.
Even now, after the worst seems to have passed, there is a sense of unease about what this ‘new normal’ might look like. With so many people still working from home or splitting their time between the office and the kitchen table, do we really need this number of parking spaces?
Revenue from Public Parking
Corporate parking may be hugely expensive, but when it comes to public parking it can be a gold mine. Ireland brings an average of around €360 million in parking charges per year. The approximate breakdown looks like this:
- Local authorities were taking around €115 million.
- Private car parks made roughly €80 million.
- Railway stations and transportation hubs made €70 million in parking fees.
- Shopping centres totaled €50 million.
This money is divided between the owners of the spaces and the government but it’s thought that roughly €150 million arrives in the exchequer each year thanks to car park spaces.
Now, €150 million is nothing to sniff at, but when you consider the total expenditure of the Irish government forecasted for 2024 is just about €110 billion, it suddenly doesn’t seem like that much.
The Rise of Car Culture and Parking
The mad rush to fill our world with car parking spaces primarily occurred in the second half of the 20th Century when our love of the automobile really exploded and was matched by much more affordable prices.
Evaluating the Need for Parking Spaces Today
Today, there are a record number of cars in Ireland, but have we reached the tipping point and what does this mean for our vast array of parking spaces?
With driverless cars coming down the road (pun very much intended) and other developments including Uber and Lyft, many countries – including Ireland – may find that we have drastically over-engineered the amount of parking space needed in the future.
This shift could also lead to a reevaluation of parking permits and disabled parking spaces, ensuring they meet the evolving needs of the public.
The Future of Parking and Urban Mobility
Uber announced last year that its drivers are making more than one million trips a day – could the millennial and Gen Z generations decide that they no longer need a car and don’t want to tie up significant capital in buying and maintaining a vehicle?
While it’s impossible to predict the future, it seems likely that our current trend for cars and the necessary spaces to accommodate them will come to an end at some point in the near to mid-future.
It’s unclear where we go from here, but with new technology, along with profound changes in social behaviour that comes with something like the Covid-19 pandemic, it seems likely that there are going to be major changes in the coming decades.
But that might be getting a little ahead of ourselves. Exciting changes may be ahead, but for the time being cars and other vehicles still play a fundamental part in our lives.
Make sure you have the right kind of car insurance with 123.ie, especially as we begin to head into the colder months. The world is changing rapidly and at times it can be difficult to keep up, but for the time being, let’s focus on the here and now.
