Progress on Parking

An update on parking from about-to-retire engineer Paul Pinsker – the city’s parking bylaw dude:

I was asked the other day whether or not we had approved any zero-car multiple housing projects.

Indeed we have, going back to the warehouse-to-loft sites in Gastown whereby no parking was provided, to SRO’s more recently approved.

However, much more relevant are the Teenager Steps we have been taking recently at transit hubs and neighbourhood centres.  For example, at Marine Gateway (below right), with a maximum parking allowable for all uses imposed, we are getting about a 30 percent reduction in residential parking with shared use of parking, car-sharing, a bike mobility centre, and of course the Canada Line.

At the centre of Marpole, the “Safeway Site” (below) is subject to a minimum-maximum that brackets the normal minimum requirement by +/-10 percent, despite desperate appeals from the developer to not limit parking providable (or at least limit it to a significantly greater amount).  We are permitting them to imclude a limited amount of tandem stalls, though, as part of our compromise.

They forget that at such a location there will naturally be about 15 to 20 percent of the households that don’town a car since elder occupants in particular will gravitate to such a convenient, transit-friendly location.  These went through rezoning processes whereby we test more restrictive parking policies (to the chagrin of our Legal Services Dept which frowns on our deviating from the Parking By-law as currently written).

Expect that in the Transportation Plan we will see even more aggressive parking standards.

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