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Families in Brisbane’s outer suburbs are being driven to own three or more cars as infrastructure and public transport fail to meet the city’s rapid growth.
Brisbane Times analysis reveals the city’s five most car-heavy suburbs are between 16 and 20 kilometres from the CBD.
Most are affluent areas, and none have train stations.
Ransome, a small suburb in Brisbane’s east, is the car-ownership capital, with three in five families reporting they had three or more vehicles at home on Census night in 2021.
Next was Burbank (53.8 per cent of households had three or more cars), Chandler (51.6 per cent), Willawong (42.6 per cent), and Pullenvale (41.3 per cent).
All five suburbs, except Willawong, had a greater proportion of households with three or more cars than a decade ago.
The main residence in this property for sale in the Brisbane suburb of Pullenvale boasts a spacious four-car garage.Credit: NGU Real Estate
Inner-city dwellers are more inclined not to own cars.
The top five suburbs with no cars were in the inner-city with more public transport and walking options – Brisbane City (40.4 per cent of homes had no vehicles), Bowen Hills (29.2 per cent), Fortitude Valley (28.7 per cent), Spring Hill (23.8 per cent) and South Brisbane (21.9 per cent).
Gail Savage, who lives in north-western suburb The Gap, owns three cars with her partner.
She said she had trialled catching public transport to save money due to cost-of-living pressures, but unreliable service made her late for work at Geebung, 18 kilometres away.
“I was late to work five times due to trains breaking down or suspended, and I had missed connecting buses to get home due to trains not running on time,” Savage said.
“Not to mention the drug users and teenage eshays running amok ... so even though it is more expensive to run your own car, at least it’s safer and more reliable.”
In The Gap, one in five households had three or more cars, and just 2 per cent had no cars.
It’s a different story in inner-city Annerley, where only one in 10 homes had three or more cars, while one in 10 lived with no cars.
Annerley single mum Sophie Haring does not own a car and uses her e-bike and bicycle trailer to commute to work, do the daycare drop-off, shopping and other errands.
Sophie Haring with her son Johnathan, 5, lives without a car.
Haring said she saved on parking, registration and petrol costs, and her workplace had indoor bike storage, showers and lockers.
“I haven’t had the car for three years and wouldn’t have it any other way,” she said.
“I do occasionally take public transport or borrow my sibling’s car when needed.”
Griffith University Cities Research Institute deputy director Professor Matthew Burke said it was difficult to get anywhere without a vehicle in Brisbane’s top car-heavy suburbs as infrastructure and public transport had not kept pace.
“They’re also suburbs where people are now starting to really complain about the traffic congestion on their routes into the city, where those very same people are the traffic congestion on the routes into the city,” he said.
“The question for some of these routes is, how can we get alternatives out there?”
Burke said car occupancy was “incredibly low” in Brisbane, with just 1.1 people per car each trip, compared with more than two people in the 1960s.
“So even though we’ve doubled the size of a lot of roads in Brisbane, they’re only carrying the same numbers of people that they used to carry,” he said.
New student housing boomed in suburbs such as South Brisbane over the past decade, Burke said, while the inner-city had on-road parking restrictions and rules limiting one-bedroom units to half a car space.
Analysis of the number of cars registered with Transport and Main Roads, cross-referenced with the Census, shows the cars per person in South Brisbane fell 27 per cent from 2011 to 2021 – to 0.44 cars per person – even as the population boomed from 5416 to 14,292 people.
Burke said working from home a couple of days a week could ease the stress caused by an extreme commute for people in outer suburbs.
Brisbane’s top five car-heavy suburbs – except for Willawong – all had a higher percentage of employed people working from home on Census day in 2021 than the top-five suburbs with no cars.