Opinion: Why we should abolish minimum car parking requirements

Surface parking lot at the suburban Parkgate Village strip mall in North Vancouver. (Google Maps)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Sean Sallis-Lyon, who is a resident of North Vancouver.

Have you ever wondered why Canada has so many giant, empty parking lots? It’s not quite as bad as in the US, where they have four parking spaces for every car, and where city centres devote 20% of their valuable land to parking.

But we still have a lot of wasted space taken up by concrete and asphalt. The worst part is that we’ve forced this on ourselves.

Most municipalities throughout North America have minimum parking requirements, where they legally force landowners to build a certain number of parking spots on their property, even if they don’t need them. These bylaws are strangling our cities here in Canada, and we need to change them.

To be clear: if a homeowner wants space to park cars on their land, that’s fine. And if a developer wants more parking, go for it. But forcing developers and homeowners to set aside their valuable land for parking? That’s bad city planning.

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We are in the midst of a climate emergency. We need to take steps to discourage driving, but instead we are actively enforcing parking minimums with our municipal policies, practically begging our populace to drive more.

Canada is destroying the equivalent of three farms every single day in the name of urban sprawl, and yet we’re wasting valuable land with concrete parking spaces. Not only does this lead to more unnecessary driving, but concrete accounts for around 8% of global CO2 emissions. We don’t need more parking; we need more buses and rapid transit.

parkgate shopping centre north vancouver

Surface parking lot at the suburban Parkgate Village strip mall in North Vancouver. (Google Maps)

Many people don’t understand just how much more efficient public transit is compared to driving. The 401 is a good example — it’s the busiest highway in North America, connecting Toronto and Montreal, two of Canada’s biggest cities. It gets more traffic than any US highway, but despite this, it still moves far fewer people than a single subway line on the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC).

In 2019, an average of 359,850 vehicles travelled the Toronto section of the 401, whereas Line 1 on the TTC moved 850,000 riders per weekday. Public transit is just much more efficient than cars, and the same applies to buses and bikes. It’s even worse when you factor in the land requirements for parking, which we enforce with minimum parking requirements.

If property owners want to save money and don’t want to build parking lots, they should be free to make that choice. Forcing them to build parking they don’t need severely limits their options.

Municipalities sometimes make exceptions for developers when they build next to public transit, but that’s not good enough. These requirements shouldn’t exist in the first place and are not necessary.

Let’s imagine we eliminated minimum parking requirements, and a developer wanted to build some mid-rise apartments. If the development were near transit, then they could build just a few parking spots if they wanted, and save on costs. If the development were far from transit, then they could choose to provide more parking.

There’s no need for legislation that forces developers to provide a minimum number of parking spaces when they don’t need to.

For example, here are some parking requirements from the municipal government of the District of North Vancouver:

north vancouver district parking requirements bylaws

Parking requirements bylaws. (District of North Vancouver)

Let’s assume that an average parking spot measures 2.5 metres by 5 metres, or 12.5 square metres. Not counting the outdoor display, a small convenience store 200 square metres in size must by law provide four parking stalls or 50 square metres of parking space.

That’s space that could be used for patios, for trees, or for a whole other business.

Think about that. Even a small convenience store, meant to serve locals, has to give up 50 square metres of valuable land for parking. It’s an onerous requirement, one that discourages small businesses from serving residents who like to walk to their local shops. A single “free” parking spot can cost up to tens of thousands of dollars to build, and street parking doesn’t make sense for most businesses, at least not when alternatives like patios or bike lanes provide better value for money.

If a business wants to open a new shop, they might even have to buy up an adjacent historic building, demolish it, and put in a parking lot, just to meet the minimum parking requirements.

The same goes for residences. If you want to build a multi-unit residential building, you not only have to provide one parking space per unit but also an additional parking space per 100 square metres of gross residential floor area. This means developers have to build large, expensive underground parking lots, greatly increasing the cost of construction. What about developments for people who don’t want to drive everywhere?

If you look at TransLink’s public transit map of North Vancouver, notice that there are bus routes basically everywhere. Even a low-density location like Deep Cove has buses that go by every 15 minutes in both directions until 11 pm, and service doesn’t stop until after 1 am. Despite this, there are strict minimum parking requirements along that entire corridor.

North Vancouver public transit service map. (TransLink)

Housing affordability is important and needs to be addressed, but we also need to address transportation affordability. Car ownership costs far more than most people realize. In the US, the lifetime cost of a small car is over US$400,000. However, this number is just the tip of the iceberg; if you include taxes that go toward highways, roads, and streets at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels, that number jumps up even higher, to the point where car ownership ends up costing an average taxpayer around 20% to 40% of all the money they will ever earn in their life.

This is without even mentioning the social costs of car ownership. Changes to minimum parking requirements should also come with changes to our restrictive zoning bylaws. We need far more mixed-use neighbourhoods, with more grocery stores and small shops. We should be able to walk or bike for most of our trips, instead of being forced to drive 2 km to the nearest store to buy milk for our coffee.

Underground parking. (Shutterstock)

This isn’t about forcing people out of their cars. Rather, it’s about ending mandatory subsidies. It’s about levelling the playing field, so other transportation options are able to compete fairly.

While the federal government should not interfere in the municipal affairs of its provinces, it would be reasonable for provinces to take matters into their own hands.

In the coming months, BC will finally eliminate restrictive single-family zoning. But they should go a step further and also eliminate minimum parking requirements. We should do this in all our provinces.

In 1970, Joni Mitchell sang that they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. She was absolutely right.

Parking minimums are inefficient, expensive, bad for businesses, and greatly encourage driving when we should be encouraging other forms of transportation instead. Let’s not wait for a few municipalities to maybe consider voting on this in a few decades; let’s eliminate these archaic parking requirements at the provincial level, across Canada.

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