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Put Toronto parking in its place

Parking’s a primo urban issue for motorists all right, but you might be surprised to learn how critical parking policy is in determining whether or not a city prospers.

Whether you own a vehicle or not, you’re paying thousands of dollars a year to support parking infrastructure, and your world is fundamentally affected by that. It’s time to pay attention to the way current policy favours cheap and plentiful parking over other urban activities.

The problem is, some people rate finding spaces for their car up there with basic needs like housing and water, and our planners have bought into that mindset.

Embedded in planning rules are requirements that new multi-residential buildings provide close to one parking spot per person, plus visitor parking. The cost of constructing these underground parking structures is around $40,000 per spot, and this is passed on to condo purchasers and renters, often representing over 10 per cent of unit cost. Garage maintenance costs also significantly affect rents and condo fees well into the future.

Pricey parking structures make smaller developments more difficult, too, and dictate height because there have to be enough units to justify their cost. I’ve seen many good little developments with commercial units for stores at grade and three to four apartment units rejected because they can’t offer places for cars. The cost of providing parking contributes to making mid-size buildings difficult to justify economically.

This seems to contradict the City Plan, which envisions four- to six-storey buildings along most major roads, increasing density without throwing our streets into shade. The problem: the building lots lining most of these roads are narrow and shallow, so providing parking behind or underground is impractical, making mid-rises almost impossible to build. Indeed, the relative lack of this kind of modest densification on main streets is in part a direct consequence of parking favouritism.

Blame parking as well for limiting the green canopy the city is desperate to foster: large underground garages are covered by too little soil to allow anything other than shrubs to thrive.

Parking also affects our ability to make intelligent public transport decisions. Fulfilling its free parking mandate forces GO Transit to spend hundreds of millions on expensive multi-level garages instead of expanding services. Simply keeping these structures in good repair will require twice as much as the annual $650 by which the government subsidizes each Metropass holder.

Imagine if the TTC had $40,000 (the cost of a constructing one parking space) worth of capital dollars to attract each new rush-hour rider. The mayor’s subway vision would be easily financed by such a sum, which shows how crazy subsidizing parking really is.

There’s no question that free or cheap parking is one of the largest inhibitors of transit use. That’s why many cities, like Vancouver, have applied a parking tax that brings in revenue to help boost transit alternatives and makes transit competitive.

And imagine what Toronto would look like if we removed on-street parking on streets like King or Queen and put some of it underground, as they do in Europe. Then we could easily create segregated public transit lanes without affecting vehicle traffic capacity, and/or build segregated bike lanes.

In Montreal, streets are expanded in summer to accommodate larger patios and sitting space, and merchants actually ring up more sales more people come to these neighbourhoods although there are fewer spots for cars.

In Bordeaux, France, and other European cities, parking that clogged beautiful medieval squares was removed (some put underground) and the public spaces became vibrant once again. While parking is important for some kinds of commercial development, increasing delivery options can offer shoppers the same level of convenience.

Studies already show that in most of our on-street retail districts, like King, Queen, Dundas, Bloor and College, 70 per cent or more of shoppers come by foot, public transit and bike. It seems logical that businesses should try to improve conditions for the majority of their customers, not the minority.

Other studies have shown that upwards of 10 to 20 per cent of traffic capacity in commercial districts with on-street parking consists of cars driving around looking for a spot. That’s a lot of wasted street capacity and shows why dealing with parking intelligently is critical to managing congestion.

New York City and San Francisco, among other cities, are starting to install magnetic sensors that detect whether a parking spot is occupied. This info is fed to an app that allows people to quickly find a place. In San Francisco, the system adjusts the price of a spot to encourage turnover, which is better for merchants it gets more customers in and out and applies the principle of supply and demand to accurately price parking.

Parking is a very sensitive matter, and finding consensus on it can be a challenge. But the wrong decisions mean our streets will be increasingly choked by traffic. It’s time to show some courage.

news@nowtoronto.com | twitter.com/nowtorontonews

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