City Council approves abolishing minimum parking requirements in Vancouver's central areas

In an unanimous decision, Vancouver City Council today approved the elimination of minimum vehicle parking requirements within new building developments in the West End neighbourhood of downtown Vancouver and the Broadway Plan area.

These changes are essentially an expansion of the 2019 policy that first abolished such requirements within new buildings elsewhere in downtown Vancouver, including the Central Business District.

This means building developments will not have to excavate deeper for additional underground parking, which significantly adds to construction costs and timelines and increases greenhouse gas emissions from both the extra concrete used and the many more construction truck trips needed. It will enable builders and developers to provide the amount of vehicle parking supply based on their forecast demand for such spaces.

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The expansion of the policy will come into effect on January 1, 2024, and specifically target vehicle parking requirements for general uses. The changes will not impact the required number of stalls for accessible parking and visitor parking.

“This is part of ensuring that we don’t have an oversupply of parking. I think that having an arbitrary minimum did not provide the flexibility for the market to build,” said ABC councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung during the meeting.

She says developers have brought forward examples of projects they built near rapid transit, but had to provide a high degree of vehicle parking due to the City’s bylaws, with the parking then being under-utilized.

“Anything that can make it easier to deliver housing economically, deliver it faster, and streamline the process is fully aligned with this Council’s objectives,” added Kirby-Yung.

Green councillor Adriane Carr added, “I’m really pleased with seeing and hearing evidence from an economic point of view that these kinds of reductions of minimums increase the viability of some projects, reducing time, money, and greenhouse gases.”

Area where minimum vehicle parking supply requirements will be eliminated starting in January 2024, including the 2019 elimination area of Downtown. (City of Vancouver)

According to City staff, the cost of building underground parking levels for apartment buildings can exceed 20% of the total project construction costs, with each stall carrying an average cost of about $60,000 to $80,000 and up to as much as over $120,000 per stall depending on site size, layout efficiency, and/or soil conditions.

Over the last few years, a growing number of projects have overcome tight land constraints for circuitous parking ramps and the minimum parking requirements by incorporating heavy-duty car elevators into their designs.

As a condition of not having to meet the minimum vehicle parking requirements, developers will need to provide an acceptable amount of transportation demand management (TDM) measures, such as providing monthly public transit passes to a proportion of building users for a certain period of time, setting aside parking space for a car share service and providing car share vehicles, and incorporating active transportation considerations into their building designs.

“I’m excited about the simplification of the transportation demand management measures and how we use that as the tool to make it a lot easier for people to choose other modes of transportation. I particularly see a lot of benefit in expanding car share and where we use new-builds as an opportunity to create an electrified charging space for car share so that our local companies, particularly Modo, can expand electric options in their fleet,” said OneCity councillor Christine Boyle.

“The easier and more convenient it is for people to see and access a shared vehicle, the more they’re likely to use it.”

According to City staff, pre-pandemic 2019/2020 data shows off-street parking spaces — such as underground parking and surface parking — within the Broadway Plan area were under-utilized, with 61% of the stalls occupied on average on weekdays and 16% occupied on weekends. The vacancy levels are highest in employment areas, such as the Central Broadway office district, near Vancouver General Hospital, and in the False Creek Flats industrial area.

There are about 15,500 publicly accessible parking stalls within the Broadway Plan area.

In comparison, within downtown Vancouver, off-street parking utilization fell by 6% from 67% to 61% between 2008 and 2018. Over the same period, downtown Vancouver’s off-street parking supply dropped by 6% from 35,100 to 33,000 stalls, which is largely from the redevelopment of public parkades and surface parking lots into new buildings with less parking supply.

It was also noted the recently completed 530-f00t-tall, 37-storey The Stack office tower — Metro Vancouver’s current tallest office building and one of the largest office buildings in terms of floor area, with 550,000 square feet of office space — provided 60% less off-street parking than required under bylaws. Through the provision of TDM measures, the building offers just 161 vehicle parking stalls in its underground levels.

2019 excavation work for the underground vehicle parking levels of The Stack office tower in downtown Vancouver. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

During the deliberations, it was also shared that an estimated proportion of 50% of working residents in the West End walk to work.

“Even with TDM measures to support sustainable transportation choices, we still know there will be some cars, and they need to park somewhere,” said Tim Barton, the Acting Manager of Transportation planning for the City of Vancouver.