City invites even more cars

A city-owned development adds 200 new parking spots to our already bloated inventory. Why should private developers behave any differently?

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

The City of Vancouver is in a leadership position at the Greater Vancouver Regional District. This body has for a long time now recognized the fact that excessive car dependency among residents of the region has contributed to alarming deterioration of the city's beauty, convenience, and prosperity by creating excessive pollution, traffic, and safety hazards. The effects of excessive car dependency are most pronounced in Vancouver among all GVRD municipalities. One would expect therefore the City of Vancouver to be most concerned about leading the way in alleviating, or at least slowing, the progression of the city toward worsening conditions due to ever increasing car dependency.

A city administration, however, cannot easily legislate that people cannot use their cars (though such actions have been taken in London, Paris, and other leading cities, so seriously do they feel, over there, that traffic imperils the livability of their environment). But a City administration can create conditions that both discourage car use, and that encourage use of public transit.

Car use by daily commuters is that category of usage that is most susceptible to inducements to switch to public transit. The easiest way to discourage car use by daily commuters is to restrict the total number of places cars can be parked when commuters go to work. While the City would have a battle on its hands if it tried to remove parking lots and reduce the number of parking spots, it can certainly slow the growth of new parking spots added to the city's inventory by making changes to the building permit process.

Currently, anyone putting up a building must supply a certain minimum number of parking spots. This seems backward. The City should instead be insisting on a maximum number, and that number should be less and less as we progress towards a less car dependent city.

One Kingsway, a City-owned community center and apartment development at Kingsway and 7 th , must also abide by this out-of-date and backward permit rules. This building was originally required to provide 240 parking spots. But the City was able to bend the rules as it frequently does. In this case, the project directors of One Kingsway commissioned a study of the usage rates of other community center parking lots, and with the results were able to convince the permit board to allow One Kingsway to supply only 198 parking spots.

The problem is, the study that generated this result was intended to show that 198 parking spots was entirely adequate for all car users the project directors could imagine coming to the building. In other words, the City itself is building a project that contravenes its own often-stated desire to see car dependency in Vancouver reduced, partly by making parking spots more scarce. Though the project achieved a reduction in the number of spots the by-laws for development demand, it did not achieve any reduction in the spots commanded by the ever-increasing car dependent culture. At a time when other cities around the world are actively, and at great expense, reducing the number of their parking spots, the City of Vancouver, in its own development project, is proposing to add nearly 200 spots to the city's already bloated overall inventory.

One Kingsway is situated very near many transit lines and is not too far from a Skytrain station. Nearby merchants and residents, less concerned for pollution, traffic, and safety, and wishing only for more parking, in combination with a sticky City bureaucracy, have succeeded in stymieing the expressed desire of the citizenry of Greater Vancouver to see steps taken to reduce, or at least slow the increase of, the city's dependency on cars.

Add to this the uninspired ugliness of the proposed building, and you have what often appears elsewhere as the result of a closed-minded and insular citizenry. Each parking spot costs a building project about $25,000. The supply of parking could be cut in half to provide $2.5 million for the creation of a little beauty at the original center of our beloved, if besieged, city. But no. Even at City Hall, parking for cars takes precedence over beauty. If that's true for our very own public sector projects, how can the City ever argue without hypocrisy that any private developer should do more?

When others travel here and consider Vancouver as a singular organism, the only conclusion they'll be left with is that this must be a closed-minded and insular town full of humourless people who don't get out and about much. We'll be hard pressed, as backward people everywhere are, to argue, so long as public projects like One Kingsway loom over the very heart of our city.

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