But last month the tribunal threw out an approval for a "deep green" apartment project in Brunswick next to a railway station, bike path, bus route and tram line – because it had no car parking.

"A car parking reduction to zero is acceptable," two members of the state planning tribunal said in their order last week over a planned tower in South Yarra that was ultimately ruled out because of its design and amenities.

Stonnington Council opposed the plan by Third Street Pty Ltd to build an 11-storey tower in South Yarra's narrow, dead-end Hazeldon Place, 150 metres from bustling Chapel Street.

The tower was to be built on a block of land the size of a small tennis court – 10 metres wide and 23 metres deep.

Stonnington mayor Claude Ullin said the lack of car parking would have been fine in that location, although a car share service would have been good.

The two Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal members, Rachel Naylor and Alison Glynn, ruled that while the 29 apartments the developer wanted on the site were unacceptable, the plan for zero parking was fine.

The ruling comes after another VCAT member last month threw out Moreland Council's approval for Nightingale, a planned Brunswick block of 20 apartments.

Nightingale was also in a narrow, dead-end street next to Anstey railway station.

State planning tribunal member Russell Byard overturned Moreland Council's approval for Nightingale, pointing out in his ruling that "no such arrangements, whether by means of alternative cars or public transport, are as convenient as private car ownership".

He also pointed out that most of Melbourne's post World War II suburbs had been developed "on the basis that people would have private cars so that many locations are poorly served, even barely served by public transport".

Moreland Council has now written to Planning Minister Richard Wynne asking him to amend the state's car parking laws, as a result of the tribunal's decision on Nightingale.

Under Victorian planning laws, every council (except in the CBD) requires landowners to provide a minimum amount parking for new developments.

For each one or two-bedroom dwelling, developers must provide at least one parking space, and two for every apartment with three or more bedrooms. But councils can choose to waive these minimum requirements.

A spokeswoman for VCAT said that the tribunal did not make the laws that it enforced, and that different planning schemes applied in Brunswick and South Yarra, with different requirements in relation to car parking.

"Applying the policies to the particular facts and circumstances of each case may lead to different outcomes in different locations," she said.

She added that independent planning experts at a recent public seminar on Nightingale had "supported VCAT's decision".

RMIT planning and parking expert Elizabeth Taylor said the order for the South Yarra plan had found it would have been detrimental to urban design to fit car parking in.

In the case of Brunswick's Nightingale plan, VCAT had focused not so much on urban design or amenity but on how much parking was "enough" to avoid spillover into local streets, Dr Taylor said.

But trying to predict car parking demand would simply not work. "Cities can't plan their way out of parking problems," she said.