Parking in Waterloo Region

[ijmorlan]

I wonder why the City wouldn't add public or private parking requirement to the underground footprint of all new buildings and use the earmarked lands for future building development?

I think the basic direction is to reduce the amount of parking in each building.

It’s well-established in the reality based community that parking requirements are usually utterly bogus. If it is the democratic will of the people that they want to provide cheap or free parking for drivers, then they need to pony up the tax dollars to do it, not hide it in the cost of development. This could be done by doing deals with developers — there is a selling price for parking at which developers will build parking garages into their buildings. It just happens to be way above the market price of parking, mostly because the city has forced previous developers to build absurd amounts of parking, resulting in a glut and extremely low market prices for parking. So yes, it’s time to end the insanity.