Edmonton becomes the first major Canadian municipality to eliminate parking minimums
 

Edmonton first major Canadian municipality to eliminate parking minimums:cheers::tup::tup::tup:
June 23, 2020

Edmonton City Council voted to remove minimum parking requirements from Edmonton’s Zoning Bylaw at today’s Public Hearing. Effective July 2, 2020, developers, homeowners and businesses will be able to decide how much on-site parking to provide on their properties based on their particular operations, activities or lifestyle.

“Parking is a powerful, but often hidden, force that shapes how our communities are designed and influences every aspect of how people live, work and move around,” said Kim Petrin, Development Services Branch Manager, City of Edmonton. “Eliminating parking minimums delivers significant long-term benefits for Edmonton. It removes economic barriers to new homes and businesses, and improves choice and flexibility in how businesses and homeowners meet their parking needs. It also supports more diverse transportation options and climate resilience, and moves us closer to achieving the vibrant, walkable and compact city we heard Edmontonians want through public engagement for ConnectEdmonton and the draft City Plan".

On-site parking is expensive, running anywhere from $7,000 to $60,000 per stall. This cost gets passed down in the rent or mortgage Edmontonians pay, goods bought and services used. Removing minimums is a practical, fiscally responsible move that creates the possibility for a less auto-centric future.

This high cost of on-site parking has also created significant economic barriers to affordable housing development and the ability for new businesses to open in Edmonton. Eliminating parking minimums paves the way for more diverse, affordable housing choices, and walkable main street shopping areas and local amenities, such as neighbourhood coffee shops, that Edmontonians have told the City they want.

Removing parking minimums allows for businesses and homeowners to determine their parking needs and ensure they are met, making this approach more likely to result in the “right amount” of parking.

While the change will be transformative, it will be gradual. The new rules will only come into effect as homes and businesses are slowly developed or redeveloped across the city in the decades ahead.

Edmonton has a long history of allocating a disproportionate amount of space to parking amenities. This has led to a greater than 50 per cent oversupply of on-site parking city-wide, which will not disappear overnight.

These new Zoning Bylaw rules also enable opportunities for businesses and homeowners to share parking or lease out space to nearby properties, allowing for more efficient use of Edmonton’s existing oversupply of on-site parking. Allowing developments to share parking can also help ease potential on-street parking pressure in situations where an area may be experiencing a high rate of redevelopment. The City will monitor the impacts of shared parking and report back to Council in early 2021.

Under the new rules, barrier-free (accessible) parking will continue to be provided at rates comparable to today and bicycle parking requirements have increased. Maximum parking requirements have been retained downtown, and expanded in Transit Oriented Development (TOD) and main street areas, and design requirements for both surface and underground parking facilities have also been enhanced.


For more information:
edmonton.ca/makingspace

Media contact:
Karen Burgess
Communications Advisor
Communications and Engagement
780-496-4908

This is a very positive step. It will be interesting to see how the situation unfolds in Edmonton over the upcoming years... if it goes smoothly, I could see it eventually becoming the norm across Canada.

That's great. I wish we could do that as well, or at least drastically reduce the minimum.

This would be a dream come true. I'm hopeful to just see some deep cuts to minimums here over the next few years as the City of Saskatoon reviews its Zoning Bylaw. This past spring minimums were slashed for sites along the newly designated BRT corridors, which is an encouraging first small step. Saskatoon's downtown zone and its main street corridors (Broadway, 20th St, etc.) have not had parking minimums for decades.

Well done, Edmonton. The effects of this policy change will be transformational, and hopefully its effects are eventually felt nationwide. :cheers:

It's good news. I'm still a believer of minimum parking standards though. Their problem is that minimum standards in most cities reflect a time and place that simply doesn't exist in cities anymore. Policy is/has been dictating too much parking being built. We aren't at that stage to allow developers the freedom to expand no parking from the existing niche market. That's what developers will do. They will cut budgets and time frames in half if not more. Examples of communities with under built parking capacities exist even in Canada.

Flexibility is key and now a commodity and choice for developers. You can make your development very attractive to some by providing parking or removing potential costs to you and your buyers by supplying less.

Not surprising for a city advancing the way Edmonton has done the past few years. I've thought for a couple years (at least since Ice District launched) that Edmonton's CBD is growing/changing the most 'per capita' of any Canadian major city. What it is now is exponentially better than five years ago, and in five years, now will be a distant memory. Big up to Edmonton!

Well, I don't trust developers or the market for that matter to make sound decision on supply and demand. Developers will build no parking as long as they can sell the units and there are always buyers. Understanding, Edmonton's buyers are different from Toronto. It doesn't mean it will always be that way.

The high minimums forced developers to include parking in the purchase price of units. That should have never happened. Parking should have been independently sold from the units. Developers should be allowed to bundle unsold parking units for monthly parking purposes. There are always people that are thrust into having a car and don't have a parking spot or want to own one.

Two Montreal boroughs got rid of minimum parking requirements in the past several years (the Plateau and the downtown Ville-Marie borough) and it's made a difference. There are many new towers downtown that have little to no parking, which means they can avoid digging an enormous underground garage, which speeds up construction and reduces costs.

Whenever I'm in Vancouver I am astonished at how much off-street parking there is. Every building has a big garage that is often half-empty. It has the perverse effect of making it a dense yet extremely car-friendly city, to the point where I have family, all of whom live in downtown condo buildings, who get around almost exclusively by car because there is always parking available wherever they need to go.

By contrast I live in a low-rise, traditionally urban Montreal neighbourhood that is less dense than downtown Vancouver, but only about 50 percent of the households on my block even own cars, and driving around our borough is useless because there's hardly anywhere to park.

This is great! I can’t wait til this happens city-wide here. We’ve had two substantial projects completed over the past several years with zero parking included, and a couple others with major relaxations. So hopefully that means we’re on course for city-wide eventually.

I wonder how much of this problem is caused by free on-street parking and permit parking politics? That is a big market distortion.

I believe downtown Winnipeg also doesn't require parking in new developments. I'm excited to see how this impacts developments in non-CBD but densifying areas like Whyte Ave.

If you think there will always be buyers, doesn't that prove the exact opposite point? That there's no need to even include parking because it isn't something that buyers care about? We may not "trust" developers, but in this case I'd say we should trust them over government bureaucrats because it's the developers who have big bucks on the line.

Personally I don't think that there's a huge market for parkingless properties yet and I suspect that many buyers will choose to buy a space along with the unit. But the key word is choose. I want anyone who doesn't want a parking space to be able to easily get a unit without the extra cost and for developers not to build any more spaces than they think they can sell. But given that building as many parking spaces as they can sell is a great way to make money and building more than they can sell fewer than needed to sell the suites will see them lose money, I trust them to do the right thing. :yes:

Some, no doubt, but permit parking is getting expensive as well. Anecdotally, I've noticed about 30% of private spots not being used in both free parking and permit parking areas, regardless of whether it is rental or a condo (most condos come with at least one spot). Most vacant spots seem to be due to car-less residents, or just an extra stall which isn't needed.

I like this in principle. But I do wonder, post-Covid, will as many urban people reject car ownership as was the case in the 2010s? I know myself I’m far less likely to use public transit now than before the pandemic, and I now value private car use far more than I did even six months ago.

I find it hard to imagine a situation where this doesn't all have a significant impact on transit use. Obviously people with no practical alternative will have to continue using transit, but a lot of people with options (driving, walking, cycling, working from home) will shy away. The big question is whether it affects ridership by a small percentage, or by a more significant (say, 10% or more) margin.

Developers should be able to do whatever they want... want to build apartments and offices with no windows... why not... the buyer can add them in after... windows can cost anywhere from... $500 to $100,000 dollars and those costs are often just passed on to the renters. Who needs electricity too... lol

Add to that many people will leave cramped downtown condos when you can only have two people in an elevator etc. Seems foolish to eliminate parking minimums when we are seemingly on the cusp of a car buying bounce.

...COVID-19 did have adverse effects on the city as well. A major casualty was the public transport system, which recorded a fast decline in ridership as well as frequency. The city reports that it is losing $10 million a month because of this and at one point consideredshutting down public transport in summer.

Public transport’s loss may just be car ridership’s gain. Cues can be drawn from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic, where private car sales shot up as lockdown measures eased in April. A large part of this is attributed to people feeling safer in private cars than in shared public transportation during a pandemic....

https://edmontonjournal.com/opinion/...urban-planning

Having lived in areas that have seen adjacent multifamily development it is absolutely clear that cars from those new multifamily building spill onto the adjacent residential streets, even with parking minimums. People are to cheap to buy more than one spot because they can use the street for free.

Edmonton's rather aggressive urban transit plans are helping move these kind of parking limitations along. The reality is that people need mobility of one form or another and unless there is a truly VIABLE alternative, people automatically choose the car. A bus rolling by every half an hour doesn't cut the mustard.

I didn't know that mustard could be cut!