Quote:
Originally Posted by owenhujb
Has probably been mentioned before, but why does this tower require EIGHT floors of underground parking? Is there something I am missing  |
It all comes down to Math and City by-law parking requirements.
Both hotel and office uses typically tend to require more parking because of how they're calculated which is different from how you would calculate the required parking for a purely residential (per unit)
For hotel (At least for the City of Vancouver - though City of Burnaby shouldn't be too dissimilar) it's about 1 parking space per dwelling unit (i.e hotel room) or one space per every two sleeping units and/or housekeeping units.
Which sounds similar to residential until you remember that a typical hotel room is smaller than a residential unit (average size for a decent class hotel would be between 300-325 sq. feet) . Which of course means that for a floor plate you can fit more hotel rooms than residential units despite the hotel spaces usually having higher floor-to-ceiling heights (and thus fewer hotel floors comparatively to residential floors for the same height).
More hotel rooms means more parking for each room..
Office spaces are calculated similar to any Retail use space, which is, per floor square area of office space (again for CoV it's 1 parking spot per 100 square meters or per 1,076 sq.ft of office space)
Quick math should tell you that for Office space you would need about one third the number of parking spots than Hotel space (Assuming an average hotel room size of 300-325 square feet which translates to about 20ftx15ft, and would include a full bathroom. This is generally accepted as the standard for an average hotel room size. You can find bigger, obviously, but I would have to assume that this wasn't going to be a 5 star hotel with all presidential suites).
So perhaps this might have been one of the reasons they switched from Hotel back to office? ( they would have required even more parking if they went with hotel and kept the same number of floors - assuming the same floor-to-floor heights for both (which the previous and present renders confirm) - and more parking = more excavation = more construction cost and $$$.
All speculation, obviously.
But that's a reason why you might see more developers more reluctant to build hotel components in their projects in the suburbs (especially so close to a Transit hub like Metrotown, where you hotel guests will almost invariably use the transit or taxis and not lease or have cars, leading to a lot of wasted parking slots that could have been construction savings instead, or parking for other uses.
It's puzzling why cities still require so much parking for hotel usage when logic would dictate that a large number of hotel guest likely may not be driving cars during their visits especially if they're staying at a hotel in the heart of a downtown core or as mentioned, at a transit hub like Metrotown.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Prev
Linear Mode
