Will Edmonton Be the First Major Canadian City to Eliminate Parking Minimums?
Downtown Edmonton during the quarantine. Image via Steven Fortier.
For city-builders across North America, all eyes will be on Edmonton, Alberta, Canada this summer as they look to eliminate off-street parking minimums city-wide, making Edmonton the first major Canadian municipality to do so.
At first glance, Edmonton seems an unlikely candidate for progressive parking reforms. It’s a sprawling prairie city, known for its super-sized shopping mall and connection to the oil and gas industry. A lesser-known fact (but not surprising), is that it’s also home to the world’s largest parking lot. But for those who call Edmonton home, it’s much more than blanketed in bitumen. Edmonton has the largest continuous expanse of urban parkland in North America running through the centre of it. It hosts over 50 annual festivals, has a burgeoning culinary scene and world-class university. It’s one of the youngest and fastest growing cities in Canada, filled with passionate doers and builders. Edmonton’s a city where a 20-something entrepreneur can pitch an idea and not get laughed out of the room, where communities can rally together and make change happen, and where a pragmatic city council and administration can see the sense in eliminating parking minimums.
The High Cost of Minimum Parking Requirements
With COVID-19 shining a spotlight on our urban form, attention to how we move around and interact with our human habitat is at an all-time high. Cities around the world are reconsidering how space—one of the most highly prized resources in a city—is allocated and to whom. Because of COVID-19, more people than ever are realizing just how much space we devote to one form of transportation above all: the car.
North American cities, including Edmonton, have a long history of allocating a disproportionate amount of space to automobiles. As rates of car ownership increased after World War II, planners and politicians responded with a host of policy and infrastructure interventions, including parking minimums. This simple regulatory change embedded car-dependence into our built form and collective psyche. Whether or not you own a car, parking minimums require that you provide space for one (sometimes two) on your private property. For decades, cars have demanded space, and for decades we have acquiesced.
As an urban advocate and founder of Canada Backyard Housing Association, we speak with homeowners on a regular basis who are required to build garages in their backyard homes even though they don't own a vehicle or don’t intend to rent to someone who owns a vehicle. Residents are forced to spend money on supplying parking that would have otherwise been rentable, livable space. With close to 400 backyard homes in Edmonton, most are limited to one-bedrooms or studios for this reason, making family-friendly units hard to come by. Until parking minimums are removed, houses for humans will continue to be replaced with houses for cars.
In Edmonton, parking minimums have led to a 40-50% oversupply of parking citywide. Check out the sea of red in the images below to see just how much space Edmonton reserves for cars. This type of inefficiency comes at a price. First, the sheer cost of parking is incredibly high—$7,000 to $60,000 per stall. That cost gets passed down to consumers and baked into the rent we pay, the groceries we buy, and the services we access. Second, the opportunity cost associated with a parking oversupply is substantial. Parking minimums result in wasted space and wasted business opportunities. How many developments have failed because of parking minimums? How many housing projects have been deemed financially unviable? Finally, parking minimums contribute to a more spread out urban form, causing growth at the fringes, and further entrenching us in auto-dependence. Servicing new, far-off communities is expensive and resource intensive—think new roads, sewers, fire halls, schools, and utility lines—and these costs are ultimately borne by all taxpayers. Whether or not you drive or even own a car, you are paying for everyone else to park.
Figure 1: Areas in red show space allocated to parking in different locations in Edmonton. From top left to bottom right: mature neighborhood, Strathcona, Downtown, developing neighborhood/suburb.
As you can see, this isn’t just about parking. It’s also about housing affordability, the cost of living, and health. It’s about equity, power, and resilience. Parking minimums ensure that automobiles and drivers hold power. They implicitly say that as a society, we value automobiles above all other types of transportation (take a look at your city’s budget if you need convincing on this one). Parking minimums are a subsidy for drivers. They are a form of government mandated participation in the creation and maintenance of a high-cost, high-emissions city.
The Road to Change in Edmonton
A portion of an infographic created by Municipaction and the Canada Backyard Housing Association. Click here for the full Edmonton infographic, and click here for one geared more generally for North American cities.
Now, how did Edmonton get to a place where removing parking minimums altogether is on the table? It didn’t happen overnight. A talented team of city planners has been slowly chipping away at parking minimums for years, beginning with reductions to minimum requirements. The opportunity to remove minimums city-wide comes after extensive working on establishing a shared vision for a more sustainable, compact, and healthy city.
Beyond this shared vision, helping residents and elected officials see that there is little risk associated with removing parking minimums has eased fears. City streets will not be flooded with parked cars. Private individuals, businesses, and developers will still provide parking, and the City has tools at its disposal to effectively manage on-street demand to ensure parking is reliably available for those who need it. Removing minimums is a practical, fiscally responsible choice that will allow the market to course-correct after decades of auto-dominant planning regulations. It will provide property owners with the freedom to decide how much or how little parking to provide.
A key component of Edmonton’s approach to removing parking minimums is that they are taking a one-step, city-wide approach, as opposed to phased or zone-based implementation. Limiting this policy change to specific areas of the city or phasing it out over several years would be an unjust application of a costly policy constraint. This would mean areas subject to parking minimums would be at an economic disadvantage. In order to ensure Edmontonians across the city are treated fairly, and that this regulation change is made in the most time and cost-efficient manner, parking minimums are set to be removed in one fell swoop. That being said, removing parking minimums will not change that over-night. We may not notice significant changes for 10, maybe 20 years. What’s being discussed in Edmonton is a policy change that will open the door for the possibility of a less auto-centric future.
Everyone knows that parking can be a contentious topic, but it doesn’t have to be. People take parking personally, because mobility is personal. Some equate mobility to freedom. But, let’s be clear, auto-dependence is not freedom. Being dependent on a personal vehicle for movement around our human habitat is the opposite of freedom. When owning a car is a prerequisite to accessing the essentials of life, we know that freedom has been lost.
Removing parking minimums is about leveling the playing field. It’s about revisiting the mobility hierarchy that our cities have conformed to for the last 50 years; the hierarchy that contributed to climate change, high cost cities, social isolation, inequity, and declining health. It’s about redistributing power and challenging hegemonic automobility, so that viable alternatives can arise. How we allocate space says a lot about our values and priorities. Space is power, and Edmonton might just give people the opportunity to take some of it back.
About the Author
Ashley Salvador is an urban advocate, community organizer, and social entrepreneur. She is the founder and president of Canada Backyard Housing Association—Canada’s only education and advocacy-based nonprofit dedicated to informing citizens on the benefits, challenges, and regulations surrounding backyard housing. She is also the CEO of Municipaction Inc. and has experience working across sectors on projects related to affordable housing, climate change, social isolation and inclusion, infill policy, and seniors housing.
Born and raised in Edmonton, Ashley holds a MA Planning from the University of Waterloo and a BA Honours in Sustainability and Sociology from Dalhousie University. You can connect with Ashley at her website and on Twitter.
Nashville, TN, made the news recently for not only abolishing parking minimums within its urban core, but also establishing parking maximums in the same area.