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IN OUR VIEW: Parking is a hidden tax

We need to wean ourselves off parking lots
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Parking costs more than a couple bucks an hour. (File photo)

How much does parking cost?

We're not talking about the cost for a paid parking lot or at a parking meter. We're talking about the hidden cost of parking – the cost of building parking lots that are required (usually by zoning bylaws) for houses, apartments, retail outlets, office buildings, schools, and even along the sides of streets.

A recent Metro Vancouver study on private off-street parking recently tried to pin a cost on this – it found that the true cost of a parking stall for a building where units sold for about $1,600 a square foot is between $117,400 and $134,000.

That's a staggering amount for a slab of asphalt or concrete that can only be used to store a single vehicle.

We don't think about the cost of parking, but in an era of painful housing prices and higher inflation, we should take a hard look at how parking requirements are a hidden tax on everyone, including those without cars.

Until recently, it was almost impossible to put up a building in B.C. without putting in parking spaces. With a handful of exceptions, every new building, from a house to a shopping mall to an office block, comes with local regulations spelling out how many parking spots would be required. 

After all, if we don't have enough parking at Building A, people driving there will take up spots at Building B and C and so on, becoming a nuisance.

But the side effect of these rules was that we have created a vast amount of dead space in our cities. Most parking spots aren't used much at all. And when there isn't a car sitting there, they're useless. The space taken up by parking can't be used for housing, for office or industrial uses, for retail space, for classrooms, for green space, for anything. 

But it still costs the owners of those houses and businesses and schools. It makes housing and goods and education more expensive.

We can't stop building parking overnight. We remain a car-dependent community.

But this report is another reminder that scaling back parking requirements makes land use more efficient. Where we can – where we have transit and bike lanes and walkability – new development can be cheaper and more efficient for everyone.