Pave Paradise, Put Up A Parking Lot

When Joni Mitchell wrote "Big Yellow Taxi" the world had yet to acquire the environment. It was there right enough but it was regarded with less than due deference. Among the limited cadres of the environmentally aware, who were to form an expeditionary eco-warrior force that Friends of the Earth (founded 1969) and others were to convert into a full-scale army, were the acid heads of Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon.

Joni, one of those residents, penned "Big Yellow Taxi", she has explained, when she saw a vast parking lot edging its way towards green mountains in Hawaii. "It broke my heart, this blight on paradise." Though arguably not one of her finer compositions, the song, courtesy of commercial success and its undisguised sentiment, probably helped to tune environmental perception as well as anything else had up to the point that it was released in 1970.

The line about paving paradise and putting up a parking lot had an alliterative power that spoke of the absurdity of condemning the environment to the voracious appetite of not only the automobile industry. It seems like a world away now, a time when nary a second thought was given to concreting and tarmacking over Mother Nature in order to allow the consumer society to park its car. The line, though, still makes abundant sense. It has survived as a form of eco-slogan, one current in the present.

There is a great deal of talk about cars, their movement and their parking in Mallorca. Cars are the present-day manifestation of Balearisation, the uncontrolled development of the coasts that paved dunes and put up hotel blocks. While hotels continue to attract the ire of the contemporary eco-sound political class in Mallorca (such as Més, the eco-nationalists), cars have been manoeuvred onto the environmentalist front line. Barely a day passes without cars and their associated needs, notably parking, making the news.

Let's consider some cases in point from the paradise island. Cars are to be banned from Palma's old town (unless they belong to residents). Cars being brought to the island by tourists or car-hire firms may or may not be subject to a tax. Cars are to be found creating hazards because of their parking on roads leading to unspoiled beaches (so unspoiled that people go to them in their droves and so therefore in their cars). Cars, because of their pollutant effect, are the reason for considering a  special environmental tax on large retail outlets; the car parks are so massive that they form pollution blackspots (or maybe hotspots). Cars, on account of pedestrianisation schemes, are, ironically, being deterred from entering the front line, such as in Puerto Pollensa. Cars are not to be parked (Son Serra de Marina) because they block the view. Cars, back in Palma, are to be eased away from the Paseo Marítimo by removing some parking and some lanes. This is part of the calming of traffic in Palma. The paradise island, also dubbed the island of calm by the Catalonian artist Santiago Rusiñol many a long year ago, is to retrieve a little piece of calm.

The regional government is working on a grand scheme to promote alternatives to cars. Buses, in other words. You might have encountered some of those, the ones which appear to be on unfamiliar terms with the maintenance and service departments. But not all. Some of them are even brand spanking new. And the government would need there to be a great deal of brand spanking new ones if its grand plan is to make any sense: not, one suspects, that it will do.

There is no harm in attempting to alter travel habits, but is the government aware of just how great car ownership is in Mallorca? You would have to assume that it is. Even members of the government have cars and some of them will probably have families whose combined car ownership equates to a small fleet.

The implied demon in all this car talk isn't the local resident, despite his three or four vehicles, it is the visitor and the devil's work of car-hire companies not registered for tax on the island. But it isn't typically a bunch of tourists clogging up approach roads to unspoiled beaches. It's the ones who live here, who, even if there were such a thing as a bus service to unspoiled beaches, wouldn't use it anyway.

But buses need somewhere to park as well, just as they need roads, while the  public transport alternative can always fall foul of other eco-interests. Take the rail extension to Alcudia. They could never agree on it because of the competing environmental arguments regarding the proposed routes.

Pave paradise. Parking lots. They wouldn't have given it much thought back when Joni wrote the song. Mallorca hadn't really acquired wealth then. It soon did, and it needed somewhere to park it.

Mallorca's Car Parking Crisis

Which province of Spain has the highest number of vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants? The interior ministry's department of traffic defines the Balearic Islands as a province, and the answer is the Balearics. The number, according to figures for 2014, is 821. They aren't all cars but the percentage which are exceeds 70%. As a means of comparison, this is a higher percentage of cars than that for Gran Canaria (Las Palmas), Tenerife (Santa Cruz), Malaga and Barcelona.

This first position for the Balearics has remained unchanged for years. In 2001, for instance, the number per 1,000 inhabitants was higher - 901. But the population has increased by more than 200,000 since then. (Crisis also intervened.) For years, therefore, the vehicle population of the Balearic Islands has been the densest in the country.

For the Balearics to have such high vehicle density can seem extraordinary if one thinks back fifty or sixty years. Car ownership was not great. Nor was car choice. Spain's emergence from its basket-case status of the 1950s owed a fair deal to the production of Seats, especially the 600. It may have taken time for car ownership to become massive, but car production and tourism as drivers of Spain's economic "miracle" say a great deal about where that miracle now is and also about their current-day relationship.

Back in the days of the first tourism boom, when cars were relatively scarce, parking was not of any great concern. It may seem that drivers in Mallorca continue to park wherever the fancy takes them, but in those days the fancy mattered little. It is worth bearing in mind that the advance in road use was such that it wasn't until 1976 that traffic management needs suggested that a roundabout might come in useful. And so the first one was created in Palmanova.

But while road layouts and new roads began to become concerns, parking was left in the low gear of the resort layouts of the 1960s and 1970s. There have of course been changes since then - car parking areas have been introduced when once they wouldn't have been deemed necessary - but the basic infrastructures for dealing with cars (their parking) have not kept pace (or anything like it) with the twin growth of tourism and vehicles in use.

On Saturday, when writing about the semi-pedestrianisation scheme in Puerto Pollensa, I concluded by suggesting that car parking was a flaw of the scheme. This was cited in a discussion about the scheme on Facebook. I am certainly not the only one to question this.

Without going into the whys and wherefores of the Puerto Pollensa project, it occurred to me that the issue of parking that it raises is an example of a much wider problem. And it is now a pretty major problem. How does Mallorca reconcile itself to the sheer volume of vehicles that it has? In particular, how is this reconciled with demand from tourists and also residents (and residents are just as important in this) who drive to the beach? 

Last summer there were two highly publicised examples of problems with parking. One was to do with Es Trenc beach. A car park which had been used for years was closed down on the grounds that it was "alegal", a word which suggests that no one is too sure whether it's legal or not and so the powers that be decide to err on the side of it not being legal. A consequence of this was that people looked to go somewhere else. Local businesses reported loss of trade.

The other example was in Playa de Muro and the use of the open ground in the holiday cottage area of Ses Casetes. Security guards were eventually deployed to control the number of cars, which forced ever more drivers to find parking on the main road, where they aren't supposed to park and where it is also quite dangerous if they do. 

With this summer due to bring more numbers than before to the island, then there will be more cars as well. The registered vehicles identified by Tráfico's statistics don't tell the whole picture, because of the hire cars which aren't registered here. And so the pressure for parking is going to be greater still.

There is a plan for there to be some sort of park and ride system for Es Trenc, but will it be sufficient and would it be right for everywhere? Finding somewhere suitable (and legal) to use as a car park is itself problematic, and there are too many rules inhibiting the paving of paradise in order to put up a parking lot. More public transport? But how convenient is that, especially for families hauling the paraphernalia that they do to beaches? Mallorca has a conflict between demand for its beaches and its capacity to make them easily accessible. What's the solution? Is there one?

MALLORCA TODAY - Relaxation of parking in Alcúdia's port

An agreement between Alcúdia town hall and the Balearics port authority will mean that cars can be parked in the area by the commercial port during the Sant Joan fiestas in a couple of weeks time. Though Sant Joan is not a fiesta in Alcúdia, it very much is in Menorca, and many people from Alcúdia (and elsewhere) take ferries from the port to Menorca in order to celebrate the fiestas. Car parking by the terminal building is normally prohibited but will be lifted in order to avoid excessive parking in nearby streets.

MALLORCA TODAY - New multi-storey parking for Palma airport

The AENA airports authority has given the go-ahead for the building of a new car park at Palma airport. With an initial budget of 12.7 million euros, the new car park, for both long stay and hire cars, will have 2,173 spaces.