In Regina, there is parking. Plenty of parking.
A study by the city three years ago showed that almost half the privately owned land in downtown Regina was devoted to parking. The finding was part of a debate about whether the city’s planning commission should allow even more parking lots to proceed.
The work to quantify how much parking there was produced the same result as many other cities have found when they undertook similar research: there’s way too much of it. A University of Calgary report in 2021 estimated there are about three parking spots in Canada for every vehicle.
The planning ethos that emerged after the Second World War focused on designing cities around the priority of moving, and parking, cars. Now, cities across North America are starting to reconsider parking – something that most people had taken for granted as part of urban life.
In the late 2010s, Edmonton discovered it had 50 per cent more parking across the city than it needed, a vast oversupply that existed in large part because of what are called parking minimums. City planners long dictated how much parking they believed was required in any new residential or commercial development. It sounded reasonable – parking is often necessary – but it led to the wasteful inclusion of too much parking.
And that carried a hidden cost, especially in housing. A parking spot can increase the price of a home by tens of thousands of dollars.
Edmonton in 2020 put itself in the vanguard of change. It eliminated parking minimums citywide, allowing builders to decide how much their project needs. There’s still obvious demand for parking but not nearly as much as planners had imagined.
Toronto city council in late 2021 made the same move as Edmonton, saying the change “strikes a balance between too much and too little parking.”
This year, the parking revolution has gained momentum. The federal Liberals, as part of their successful housing accelerator program to give cities money if they increase housing density, have worked with cities to eliminate parking minimums downtown, near transit, or as part of new zoning for multiplexes.
Regina city council in January chose to emulate Edmonton and scrapped parking minimums citywide, as it sought housing accelerator funding from Ottawa.
In late June, Vancouver also eliminated parking minimums citywide, the culmination of several years of loosening such rules. Vancouver in 2018 ended parking minimums downtown. Last November, it did so for two areas near downtown. Thereafter, the provincial government passed housing density legislation that applied to cities across British Columbia. That required the end of parking minimums near transit and for other new housing density. Vancouver decided to make the change citywide.
The reasons the city cited are the same everywhere. The end of parking minimums bolster the economics of development, especially for affordable housing, as extra and unneeded costs are stripped away. And the development process is sped up and simplified, from a slimmer book of rules to less city staff time spent on tallying whether a builder has included just the right amount of parking.
Early results of reform elsewhere are positive. In Minneapolis, the amount of new parking is down by roughly a third compared with a decade ago. A study of parking reform in Buffalo and Seattle found that about two-thirds of new housing benefitted from the changed rules. In San Diego, the end of parking minimums near transit led to an increase in the construction of affordable housing.
More Canadian cities are poised for change. The City of Ottawa’s draft zoning bylaw, released this spring, does not include minimum parking rules and neither does Montreal’s 2050 draft land use and mobility plan, released in June. Some cities, however, remain cautious. When Calgary loosened its citywide zoning in May, it maintained some parking minimums.
Smart urban design is one reason that underpins the widespread rethinking of how much valuable space in cities is taken up by too much parking. Amid stratospheric housing costs, the imperative to change old arcane rules is long overdue and abundantly clear. In Canada, Edmonton led the way. Other cities are smart to follow.