Understanding zoning and land use regulations is important because these laws truly shape the spaces that we spend our lives in, and our perception of these spaces. And of all these laws, the ones related to cars and parking have had perhaps the most significant impact on the way we live and how we engage and interact with the environment around us.
I grew up in a car-dependent city – Karachi, Pakistan, where car traffic, vehicular pollution, and lack of alternative commuting options defined my urban experience; an experience that would involve hours of being stuck in car traffic at times. This left with me a lasting aversion to car traffic, as well as a sensitivity to and awareness of the societal costs of a car-dependent city, and the equity issues surrounding this more individualistic and costly method of transportation. It also shaped my perception of what a ‘city’ is supposed to look like. My experience in Toronto has been different – but also similar in many ways. Here, I can conveniently take the subway or ride publicly shared bikes inside the city to avoid car traffic, but car traffic still exists both within the city as well as outside, on the network of highways that connect the city’s suburban peripherals.
Needless to say, Karachi isn’t the only city that is designed primarily for cars over people. In Canada and the US, much of the built infrastructure is devoted solely to cars – roads, highways and parking, and has even led us to conceptualize the city as a car-based space. Cars do serve a role in our lives, and for some, are essential in meeting everyday needs. Designing our living spaces excessively around them, however, can result not just in substantial societal costs and adversity, but may have altered our perception of living spaces themselves. Continuing to devote these spaces to car infrastructure perpetuates our dependence on cars.
One important aspect of car-focused urban design is parking; in particular, minimum parking requirements, which were drafted in the 19th and 20th centuries, but exist to this day in many major American and Canadian cities. For Toronto specifically, these minimum requirements have contributed to costly, excess parking spaces that are sitting unused in many underground parking structures across downtown Toronto. According to the Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON), data shows that in new condo projects, an average of 33% of parking stalls have been left unsold. One builder, according to RESCON, had 90% still available for sale as a building neared construction. Parking spaces, especially those that come ‘bundled’ (are sold with) homes, contribute to maintaining car-dependent infrastructure and lifestyles.
Realizing the costs (one underground parking space can cost between $48,000 to $160,000 to develop, according to the City of Toronto) and consequences of building excess parking in Toronto, the city council revised its parking requirements in by-law 569-2013 in December 2021, abolishing parking minimum requirements, and replacing them with parking maximums for certain housing types. This amendment was driven by the city’s vision for a more livable, sustainable, transit-oriented city, that is less dependent on cars, as stated in its Official Plan. The policy revision was also motivated by comments from developers (received in public meetings hosted by the City in 2021 on the issue) pointing towards the mismatch of supply and demand of parking resulting from the previously mandatory parking minimums, leading to unsold parking spaces being bundled off with residential units, thus increasing rent and purchase cost of homes in the city. This is backed by a report published in 2019 by the Ryerson Urban Analytics Institute for the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario (RCCAO), which provides pertinent data on parking supply and demand, impacts on housing affordability, vehicle ownership rates and other relevant components of the issue.
An empty parking garage; Source: Pexels
While the regulation of traffic and parking on streets has existed since the 1800’s, off-street parking requirements for the automobile first appeared in North America at the beginning of the 20th century, with the rise of the motorcar and the ideas, implications and industries that came with it (Segrave, Banning Begins, 2012). The first minimum parking requirement specifically was established in 1923 in Columbus, Ohio, USA (Nichols, 2019). Today, however, especially in cities where strong public transportation infrastructure such as subways, busses and light rail rapid transit systems exist, and active transportation such as cycling and walking is making a resurgence, minimum parking requirements have been increasingly falling under public scrutiny (Engel-Yan & Passmore, 2010), and their existence and usefulness is being questioned by urban planners, politicians and members of the public alike, often resulting in by-law revisions such as the one Toronto enacted last year (Nichols, 2019); (Shoup, et al., 2020).
Toronto is not alone in abolishing the aging and archaic set of rules in the zoning bylaws that mandate minimum parking for new developments. Several major Canadian and American cities have already fully or partially eliminated minimum parking requirements from their bylaws and have placed maximums instead (Shoup, 2011); (Strong Towns, 2019). Edmonton became the first major Canadian city to abolish parking minimums in 2020 (City of Edmonton, 2020), and several major cities in the US have already fully or partially removed parking minimums, such as San Francisco, Portland and New York City (Strong Towns, 2021).
Toronto’s parking requirements by-law revision is a step in the right direction, but how much impact will it truly have towards achieving the City’s goals of improving sustainability, livability and affordability? By abolishing parking minimum requirements and setting up location-sensitive parking maximums instead, the City hopes to support land- and cost-efficient forms of development, encourage transportation alternatives to the automobile, ensure sufficient parking to meet equity needs, and make housing construction less costly to developers (City of Toronto, 2021). The by-law revision can help developers and other stakeholders through cost savings due to less (unneeded) parking construction, and it will help reduce the proportion of unused parking spaces for the future. However, it may require other complimentary policy changes in order to have a significant impact on reducing car dependence in the city overall, in encouraging people to shift to healthier and more sustainable methods of transportation, and in making housing more accessible to the city’s residents. Toronto’s transition out of car-dependence and housing unaffordability may still be some distance away, but this by-law change was certainly an important step in laying the foundations for such a transformation.
Featured image source: Pexels