The slow death of urban parking: Don Pittis

Build it and they will come is a business mantra. It encourages entrepreneurs to take a shotatsomething new withthe expectation of a flood ofcustomers.

In urban planning the term has taken on a more sinister meaning, especially when it comes toparking.

"The car requires roughly 350 squarefeetat the point of origin and 350 square feet at the point of destination," says James McKellar, an expert on the business of real estate infrastructure.

"So the car is an incredible consumer of land and the biggest contributor to congestion."

Built for cars

McKellarshould know. He's a professor at Toronto'sYork University, an institution built for the car on what used to be farmland at the north end of city's 1960s urban sprawl.

As a child I remember my dad taking my sister and meto the new campus and seeinga few buildings surrounded by an endless sea of parking lots.

But like York University, which has become a major public transit hub in the midstof an even bigger 21st century urban sprawl, Canadian urbanitesare gradually turning against the carand turning against parking.

McKellar,director of the Brookfield Centre for Real Estate and Infrastructure at York's Schulich School of Business, says condo builders have been caught short by the change.

Urban young and urban old

"I do know of one major developer who told me after he sold all his condos he was left with 120 parking units," says the business professor.

That makes a huge difference to a developer's bottom line. The cost of a parking stallworks out to about $65,000 apiece, he says.

Increasingly young urban talent wants to live downtown and people don't need parking.They use bikes and public transit and Uber. The urban old are increasingly joining them in ditching the family car.

For car-length trips theydepend on car-sharing services such as Zipcar or Car2go that McKellersays have reached a critical mass so that they are now available when needed. Robot taxis,if they ever arrive, will be the icing on the cake.

Unlike even a decade ago, the good jobs are all downtown too, he says.He offers the example ofTelus, which, in search of that young talenthas consolidatedoperations in downtown Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto.

Young urban talent no longer wants to travelout to suburban industrial parks.

For cities, a recentmove against the car is a sea-change in municipal urban planning.

Free parking isn't cheap

In the days when York University was being constructed, cities across the continent made it a requirement for residential, retail and workplace developers to include a certain number of parking spots per project.

North America-wide that means there are many more parking spots than cars, some in parking lots, some filling lanesof precious roadway,most of them free to the user, by some estimates six of them for every car.

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"We pay for the free parking we demand in every role we have in life, other than as a driver. As a taxpayer.As a resident.As a shopper," says California parking guruDonald Shoupin a video by Mobility Labcalled The High Cost of Free Parking.

In cities builtfor cars, it's a habit hard to break. But some are trying.

North America's oldest urban metropolis, Mexico City, famous for its automobile congestion, is reversing a decades-old parkingpolicy. The mayor has announced a plan actuallylimiting the number of parking spacesdevelopers are allowed toinclude in new projects.

Former architect andco-author of the bookChanging TorontoDoug Young says free parking entices people to drive, leading to the additionaland much larger costs of roads and traffic infrastructure.

One strategy that market economists preferis to make the user pay the true cost. But that true cost is hard to calculate when municipalities have required so many parking spots to be built over the years, by not granting a building permit unless the developer provided a certain number of parking spots.

No parking

"Those requirements are all being dropped and now there are some residential buildings being built in the city of Toronto with no parking," says Young, whocommutes to his job as an urban studies professor at York University by public transit.

One example is the condo called the Residences at RCMI on University Avenue where there are spots for 300 bikes but no parking, instead including "acar-share facilitycontained within the building providing up to nine vehicles."

Young says there are more such buildings in the pipeline. Vancouver has also reduced parking spot requirements in special cases.

In smaller Canadian cities such as Regina, Young saysthere is no reason that municipalities couldn't begin to eliminate parking while developing better public transit alternatives, but headmits that the culture may be hard to change.

Young says change is beginning to happen. But for now,Canada is dividing in two, the car-dependentareas where parking is cheap or free, and the urban downtownswhere owning a car is increasingly an expensive inconvenience.

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