FOR the next few weeks, the City of Winnipeg is seeking public feedback on the Winnipeg Parking Strategy, a five-year vision to manage vehicle parking across the city. It may not sound glamorous, but parking is quietly one of the most powerful forces shaping our cities, having a fundamental influence on cost of living, neighbourhood form and character, and building design.

Six months ago, Edmonton became the first major Canadian city to eliminate parking minimums for new development. The new strategy presents an opportunity for Winnipeg to follow this lead.

Parking minimums are municipal-government regulations that dictate the number of parking stalls a new development must include on its property. The ratio is derived from a decades-old formula based on building size and whether it’s a new house, apartment block, commercial building or other use. In Winnipeg, outside of downtown, 1.5 parking stalls are required for every residential unit, reduced to 1.2 in some inner-city areas.

An important shortcoming of these blanket ratios is that they do not account for variables influencing the amount of parking actually required, such as vehicle ownership in the neighbourhood, adjacent amenities, transit access, suite sizes, demographics and evolving mobility trends. Mandated parking levels have resulted in significantly more parking being built than is required.

Studies have found in the United States, there are as many as eight parking stalls for every vehicle, which is likely similar in car-dominant Canadian cities such as Winnipeg. Before Edmonton implemented its new policy, a thorough study was undertaken that found only seven per cent of parking lots city-wide are full at peak times and, overall, parking lots are typically no more than 40 per cent occupied.

It was concluded that Edmonton has 50 per cent more parking than is needed. A 2018 study in metro Vancouver found that the rate of unused parking stalls in the region’s apartment buildings was between 35 and 40 per cent.

The impact of this over-built parking is significant. The simple construction costs for parking can range from about $7,000 for a single surface stall to $40,000 for an above-ground parkade stall, and $60,000 or more for an underground stall. Knowing that range in cost, it is easy to understand why developers prefer suburban projects, surrounded by oceans of asphalt, over infill development with expensive enclosed parking.

When parking minimums are required, it is effectively an incentive for urban sprawl.

This high cost of parking is passed down to consumers, baked into rents and real-estate prices, the groceries we buy and the services we use. It can have a significant impact on housing affordability in a city. As an example, the little brick apartment buildings familiar to many inner-city Winnipeg neighbourhoods were often built with little or no parking. They provide valuable affordable housing opportunities in these neighbourhoods and are typically well leased.

If one of those buildings burns down, it is impossible to replace because of mandatory parking requirements. For most of these buildings, filling the entire property with parking alone would not meet the requirements,and if parking is located underground, affordability is lost.

Overbuilt parking pushes buildings farther apart, which has the cumulative effect of reducing urban density, increasing infrastructure needs and diminishing the walkability of a neighbourhood. The impacts of parking on the pedestrian quality of a street can be seen side-by-side on Winnipeg’s Corydon Avenue, where older buildings built to the property line with active storefronts along the sidewalk have created an attractive street to walk down. New developments have been set back from the sidewalk behind parking lots, increasing walking distances, reducing visual interest, and making the street feel less safe and less attractive to shoppers and residents.

Eliminating parking minimums does not mean eliminating parking; it instead allows developers to build what they need. Developers have a strong incentive to find the balance between building as little parking as possible and building so little that their investment becomes impossible to lease. When the market, rather than government, decides how much parking should be built, developers can be more targeted, flexible and able to incorporate less impactful solutions, which generally results in more appropriate parking amounts being built.

Parking minimums were established in the 1960s out of a fear from neighbourhood residents that new development would cause an increase in street parking. This is still a primary source of opposition to new development today. Cities that are eliminating minimums are dealing with this by taking a proactive approach to managing on-street parking. Requiring the purchase of neighbourhood parking permits, as an example, allows the city to control who is parking on the streets, ensuring that new development is not freeloading, as well as signalling to homeowners that on-street car storage does not come free with the purchase of their property.

Cities that can balance strong parking management policies with elimination of parking minimums for new development will see more appropriate amounts of parking built in the future, resulting in higher levels of investment and development, greater housing affordability, higher density and more sustainable infill growth, as well as more vibrant and beautiful streets and neighbourhoods.

Brent Bellamy is senior design architect for Number Ten Architectural Group.