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How getting rid of mandatory parking minimums is helping the climate

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/what-on-earth-parking-minimums-1.7500760

Last October, I was sitting on a streetcar, stopped at a light on Queen Street East in Toronto, when something caught my eye. It was a city notice about a proposed 60-storey condominium with 701 residences that would have parking for 701 bicycles — and just nine cars.

I was surprised over just how few spaces there were for cars. Nine? For more than 700 units? I told my colleague Emily Chung, who wasn’t surprised at all. She explained that, until recently, the City of Toronto had mandatory parking minimums, where buildings were required to have a certain number of parking spaces depending on their size.

It turns out that more and more cities in North America are removing these minimumshttps://newsletters.cbc.ca/c/16HHa0vOOLSDg3mJW0PyXwlMXpl6i. And the good news is that it’s great for the climate and the environment.

Let’s talk about parking when it comes to condominiums and apartment buildings rather than above-ground parking for malls and homes, since big cities are continually building up rather than out.

A 2022 studyhttps://newsletters.cbc.ca/c/16HHa0L0TVyuKtmxREHcslA9dcaKF for the City of Vancouver estimated that a decrease of 10 underground parking spaces could reduce CO2 emissions between 50 tonnes to as high as 8,500 tonnes.

They also noted that the minimum impact of constructing one parking space is almost equal to one year of the operation of a car, and the maximum impact is close to the operation of a car for close to 19 years.

That’s a lot of CO2 emissions.

“For each level of parking you remove, you can reduce the [greenhouse gas emissions] of a building by about 15 per cent,” said Shoshanna Saxe, an associate professor at the University of Toronto's department of civil and mineral engineering and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Infrastructure.

“The simplest, easiest thing you can do to make your building more sustainable is not have a whole bunch of underground parking.”

Another studyhttps://newsletters.cbc.ca/c/16HHa10cZ5emeTmlNiyPXaOvsZ0p2, by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation that was released in 2024, noted that the environmental impacts of constructing underground parking spaces are far-reaching, including the displacement of soil that is taken elsewhere and potentially passing on dangerous microorganisms.

And removing the soil also means a larger carbon footprint as these trucks may need to drive hundreds of kilometres to dispose of it.

And let’s not forget that once the ground is dug up, trapped CO2 is also released into the atmosphere.

Now, while cities across Canada and the U.S. are moving away from these parking minimums, they’re not doing so for the climate or the environment, Saxe noted.

It’s the cost.

A 2024 studyhttps://newsletters.cbc.ca/c/16HHa1fp4eUdJjm9IWqts02RILQ3p by the Altus Group, which provides asset and fund information for commercial real estate, found that building underground parking in Vancouver ranges anywhere from $160 to $250 per square foot. For comparison, surface parking would cost between $12 to $25 per square foot. In Toronto, underground parking ranges $175 to $300 per square foot, while surface parking ranges from $15 to $30.

Reducing parking minimums means housing becomes more affordable.

“Before Toronto rolled back mandatory minimum parking requirements, you were seeing … lots of buildings where they had way more parking than anybody wanted,” Saxe said. “People just wouldn't claim them, and they have to be absorbed, in general, by the costs in the building.”

The CMHC study also noted that there is less need for parking minimums, as our lifestyles have changed. More people are turning to ride shares, they noted. And after the COVID pandemic, more people are working from home, even if it’s only part of the time.

Of course, getting rid of parking means there needs to be a robust transit system in place, something that some cities, like Toronto, are aiming to improve by building new transit lines. Bike lanes are another important factor, she noted.

Finally, Saxe said that we need to stop making driving such an attractive method of getting around.

“People behave within the system that we build for them. And so if we say this is a place you get to by parking, we signal it with providing a lot of parking,” she said. “Then we're incentivizing people to drive, which leads to more air pollution of all kinds.”

Saxe said she is happy to see more cities move away from mandatory parking minimums.

“I think that in many ways, while it was driven by cost, getting rid of mandatory minimums is one of the best sustainability policies that's been passed in many cities around North America in the last 10 years,” she said.

— Nicole Mortillaro