Parking Minimums

Overview

Parking minimums are a controversial zoning policy that mandate a certain number of parking spots be created with any new development construction. Currently there is a debate among Canadian municipalities about the effectiveness of parking minimums in addressing transportation issues.¹

Policy Goals

• Municipalities set a minimum number of parking spaces that must accompany certain types of developments in defined municipal zones
  • Developers will often opt for more productive land use than parking when given the option, such as housing or retail space, limiting parking supply.
• Parking minimums force developments to meet the very high demand for parking in urban areas as well as attempt to reduce urban congestion by minimizing “cruising for parking”.

The Costs of Parking Minimums

Upfront Costs

Parking minimums can add thousands of dollars of costs per parking spot to new housing. For example, in Toronto it is estimated that a single parking spot costs between $50,000 and $100,000.² These infrastructure costs are the responsibility of the developer and they add that economic cost to the price of new housing. Therefore, parking minimums move the responsibility of building parking infrastructure from drivers and developers to the homebuyers.

On the local level, “when local governments require onsite parking for new housing, the cost of housing rises and the price of driving falls. The cost of parking, which drivers should arguably pay at the end of their trips, is instead paid by developers at the start of their projects. The terminal cost of driving becomes an up-front cost of property development.”³ Despite this massive upfront cost, the Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON) says data shows that in new condo projects, an average of 33% of parking stalls were left unsold.⁴ This suggests that residential demand for urban parking may not be as high as municipalities believe, while much of the demand for parking comes from commuters coming into a dense urban space.

Decreases Livability

Developments being forced to take up space with mandatory parking minimums makes places less walkable, forcing more people to drive, creating a greater demand for parking spots.⁵

Cruising For Parking

As commuting drivers search for parking at their destination, they generally slow down traffic, contributing to more congestion in the system.⁶ This extra driving increases wear on roads, vehicular emissions and creates more traffic in the long run.⁵

Parking minimums try to address problems of congestion by increasing the supply of parking, theoretically decreasing the amount of time people spend “cruising for parking”. Unfortunately this increase in parking supply makes driving cheaper, incentivizing more people to drive, ultimately creating more traffic and therefore more parking demand in the long run.⁵⁷ This phenomena is known as induced demand.

Research suggests that if parking minimum policy reduces congestion at all, it is as a result of reducing urban density, not increased availability of parking.⁸

Sprawling Cities

Areas in the Greater Toronto Area with more urban sprawl have higher rates of car ownership and discretionary car trips.⁹ These individual commuters will end up creating Traffic.

Centres of economic productivity have always been localized in small geographical areas, benefiting from the economic synergy of Urban density.¹⁰ Areas of higher economic productivity also generally have higher housing costs. This creates a workforce that lives in the surrounding communities or suburbs of an economic centre and commutes to work, usually by car.

Traffic is the inevitable result of a dispersed population all being funnelled into a smaller space at the same time.⁷ If a large amount of the labour that supports an economic centre needs to commute into that small geographic area, it will inevitably create a bottleneck effect.

Climate risk

Parking requires increasing the amount of black tarmac in urban environments, worsening the effects of summer heat waves, and worsening flooding events by creating more impermeable surfaces in already at risk environments.¹¹ There is a growing body of research showing the serious health risks that heat islands, created largely by parking lots, pose to the public during warmer months. People most at risk include people with low incomes, minority groups, women (in particular pregnant women), children, older adults (over 65 years old), people with chronic diseases, disabilities and co-morbidities.¹²

Parking Minimums and Cities

• Parking Minimums In Toronto

Footnotes

1. CBC - Calls grow to axe minimum parking rules for housing projects ↩

2. Toronto Star - Toronto to consider ending parking minimums on new developments, imposing maximums instead ↩

3. Manville, 2013, p. 49 - Parking Requirements and Housing Development ↩

4. Toronto Removes Parking Minimums for New Residential Developments ↩

5. Report on Public Health and Urban Sprawl in Ontario p.22-26 ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Inci, Eren - A review of the Economics of Parking ↩

7. Arnott et al. - Economics of a bottleneck ↩ ↩²

8. Manville et al. (2013) Turning Housing Into Driving: Parking Requirements and Density in Los Angeles and New York ↩

9. Briggs 2001 ↩

10. Economic Effects of Density: A Synthesis ↩

11. Scientific American ↩

12. The 2021 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: code red for a healthy future ↩