IDEA Series - Breaking the CoK out of the Parking Trap

Our City has plans. So many plans, lots of plans! Sustainability Plans, Transportation Plans, Neighbourhood Plans. And they all suggest that our population at large should be moving away from long distance, single occupant vehicle trips and move instead to transit, car pooling, ride shares, biking, walking....

Contradictorily, City Staff and Council are provided with free parking as part of their employment - and reciprocally staff must pay for a transit pass. So they have to pay to do the thing our plans say we want, and they get the thing for free we say in our plans we don't want. This is something the union is going to fight to keep, and that many staff like, so how could we find traction in changing this paradigm?

Providing free parking, while charging for alternative transportation is certainly not in line with the intents of the Cities plants - providing incentives directly contradicting the plans the very same staff produced and enforce and the very same council voted to adopt.

And of course that grates against a public who sometimes feel that the City wants everyone else to live a car-light lifestyle, while not doing so themselves. "Do what I say and not what I do."

When Chuck from Strong Towns visited town in September of 2022 he has a fascinating solution - Charge City Staff/Council ~$100/month to use the parking stall they have been provided - and then give them the $100 as a parking stipend on their paycheque. For the City its a wash, we hand you $100 and you hand it right back. However it now creates an opportunity for individual staff - who lets say live a  few blocks from each other, to consider carpooling and giving up one stall, saving them each $50 a month. Or maybe they live walking distance, and previously drove for the convenience. The surface parking owned by the City is all prime redevelopment sites for residential redevelopment, and reducing the demand that Staff and Council place on that parking aid to free it up for peoples homes instead of parking that is only used for half the day.

two private downtown City owned parking lots that could easily be redevleoped for much needed housing, even while preserving the existing parking inside the structure. only now, there would be a income stream to justify the parking spaces

If $100 is not enough to swing the demand, increase the cost to $200 and increase the stipend to $200. Still a wash for the City for each person who takes advantage, and it increases the incentive to find an alternative way to get to work. And so on. Perhaps match the cost of private sector parking everyone else has to pay in the City Structured Parking.

The City is the single largest landowner of under-developed land downtown. Land that would be better served as housing for people to live in, and those residents in turn generating new and more demand for downtown businesses. Preserving those surface parking areas for City Staff when the Cities own plans and strategic priorities have encouraged the opposite since at least 1990 seems prudent.

And of course there is spin off benefits of Street Safety through increased supervision by residents where there previously were none - a core principle of the cities on Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design documents. Additionally buildings in place of surface parking would create a continuous street interface, also encouraged by the Cities development criteria for safety. And finally of course, more tax base on land that is already being serviced by City infrastructure.