General Urban Waterloo Updates and Rumours

[ijmorlan]

Our building, a few blocks away from the LRT, has about 140 units, mostly two-bedroom, 1000+ sqft. Our parking garage has about 190 spaces, excluding visitor spaces. Out of those, probably 25-30 are currently going unused.

In a new development on the LRT, with mostly 1BR units, would likely need less than one space per unit.

25-30 unused spaces suggests that there are 160-165 used spaces, or slightly higher than a 1:1 ratio of units in the building to parking spots required per unit and/or bedroom.

The ratio is units in the building to parking spots used, not “required”. Just because people will use the parking if it is provided for free does not mean it is “required”.

Imagine if we regulated the bread market in the same way. Each grocery store is required to bake a certain number of loaves of bread per day, with some formula based on some measurements such as floor area of the store, number of employees, surrounding population, and/or other factors. But the formula is designed such that so much bread is required to be baked that even at $0/loaf every single store has lots left over at the end of every day that must be composted.

Clearly, bread consumption would be higher than it is. The amount of bread “required” (i.e., used) would be higher than the amount that is actually purchased in real life. Yet with the actual system, where grocery stores make or buy as much as they think is best and sell it for a price which they determine, nobody complains about bread shortages. The quantity traded at a zero price is not the “required” amount.

Given the enormous cost of providing parking, and how amazingly cheap flour is, it might actually be less disruptive to the economy to have a bread regulation such as discussed above than the existing parking minimum system.