Ending Edmonton’s Parking Minimums: What does it all mean?

July 2, 2020 Tom Jenson

As of today, Edmonton has become the first major city in Canada to eliminate off-street parking minimums from its zoning bylaws. This unanimous decision made by Edmonton’s city council in favour of “Open Option Parking” marks a turning point, undoing 50 years of auto-centric planning policy.

Unless you’re in the planning, architecture, or development industries, you may not even know what parking minimums are or how they affect you. So let’s take a look at the what parking minimums are, how they affect the design of our cities and homes, and what it means for Edmonton to have removed them.

What are parking minimums?

In the post-war boom(er) years, the car was seen as the future of capitalist society, and a symbol of personal freedoms across North America. Governments began putting their citizens to work with major infrastructure projects like national highways, which in turn increased the rates of car ownership. With “everyone” now driving to work, parking became an issue at the office, the store, and at home on community streets. City planners, with their long-term outlook at the ubiquity of cars, began to amend zoning bylaws to require new developments to provide a minimum number of off-street parking spaces to reduce on-street congestion.

Parking minimums are typically calculated per-dwelling or per-square-metre of commercial space and vary slightly based on proximity to major transit hubs or commercial areas (like office parks or event centres). This has provided car owners with plenty of free* space to park their vehicles at home, at the grocery store, or at their downtown office tower. The problem is, these minimums are arbitrary and have resulted in oversupply.

In fact, parking minimums have worked so well that parking spaces now outnumber cars 8:1 and occupy over 30% of our cities’ land area. Even worse, The City of Edmonton’s own Comprehensive Parking Study reports, “…only 39% of those spaces are being used, meaning that on average over 19,000 parking spaces in commercial sites observed are open”. As YEGardenSuites notes, “[at] an average cost of $10,000 a stall, that is close to $200 million dollars wasted, due to government regulation”.

How does parking affect design?

For your typical single-family home, parking minimums usually mean that ~225 sq.ft. (21 m²) of your lot has to be set aside for parking, whether you own a car or not. This could be in the form of a gravel or concrete parking pad, a porte cochère, or garage. This requirement is doubled if the lot’s frontage is short enough that visitors can’t find on-street space to park —that’s right, smaller lots require MORE parking space.

Residential zonings already regulate a maximum area that your home can occupy on your lot (about 45%), and these parking minimums count against that area whether or not you have a car or build a garage, making your maximum house size smaller. The only way to make up for this lost space is to build above your mandated parking space (if able), which is why so many new developments today build homes with the same form: a front-attached garage with a ‘bonus’ room above —so much for our beloved character neighbourhoods.

Home designers, like myself, end up spending much of our time designing spaces for these large cumbersome vehicles to navigate and park before we can even consider the human occupants. This is because the placement of drive aisles, driveways, and parking stalls are dependent on the slope of the site and a plethora of other rules imposed by the Department of Roads. Whether it’s a single-family home or a high-rise condo building, parking is the most restrictive element of the building’s design and it dictates the form the building will take. While many homeowners also own cars and don’t have a problem with their homes being designed around the garage, there are plenty of others who cannot or do not own a vehicle.

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The parking-less N3 condo tower in Calgary’s East Village

What does “Open Option Parking” mean?

Simply put, “Open Option Parking” means choice. Rather than mandating arbitrary parking minimums, the City of Edmonton is now letting homeowners, architects, and developers decide how much parking is appropriate to provide on their own site. This means a new startup bike shop has the option to not provide or pay for parking stalls that their clientele won’t use, while the new condo building next door continues to provide one stall per dwelling due to market demand. The homeowner who wants to build a granny suite can forgo the garage to keep the living space accessible at grade, while another may opt to build the garage knowing their tenant will want and pay for the parking.

In Calgary’s East Village, the N3 condo building was approved and built without any parking whatsoever, appealing to millennials and seniors who rely instead on the two transit lines and nearby downtown amenities. As a neighbour to this building, I can attest that its lack of parking hasn’t affected me in the slightest. It’s true that the open option may lead some homeowners to expand their homes instead of building a garage for their cars, creating parking congestion on their streets. But this already happens with those who stuff their garages with junk or own numerous vehicles; parking minimums never said these spaces had to be used for cars, just that they had to be provided.

This change won’t happen overnight, since the option only applies to new developments; it will take decades for it to have any real impact on our cities. With new transit, ride-share, and autonomous vehicles making headway, this is the perfect time to be rethinking our auto-dependence. I just hope Calgary can follow suit so we designers can get back to designing for people.