On Wednesday, Vancouver City Council voted in favour of removing minimum parking requirements across the city, joining the growing list of North American cities that are changing their beliefs and mandates around parking.
Currently, minimum parking requirements exist in all areas of Vancouver outside of Downtown and the Broadway Plan Area, mandating that developers provide a certain amount of off-street parking based on preset ratios tied to the amount of residential units and/or floor area.
The requirements often result in developers having to construct large underground parkades, adding to the cost of projects and potentially making them less viable, all while the need for parking continues to reduce as a result of improving public transportation.
This change comes after the Government of British Columbia introduced two pieces of legislation in Fall 2023: the Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendments Act and the Housing Statutes (Transit-Oriented Areas) Amendment Act, also known as Bill 44 and Bill 47, which are focused on small-scale multi-unit housing (SSMUH) and transit-oriented areas (TOAs).
As part of the two pieces of legislation, local governments are required to remove minimum parking requirements for projects that are SSMUH or located within TOAs by June 30, 2024. Instead of removing the requirements for these two categories of projects, the City of Vancouver opted to remove the requirements across the city and for all land uses.
"Rather than further dividing the existing 63 different minimum parking requirements and layering new geographic areas, this report recommends a major simplification to the City's parking regulation by eliminating all minimum parking requirements for all land uses, city-wide," said staff in a council report ahead of Wednesday's meeting. "This will advance the City's objectives towards simplifying regulations and accelerating permit approval times, as well as transportation and climate emergency goals."
The City calls this "Phase Three" of their work on parking minimums, following previous Council decisions that removed minimum parking requirements for Downtown and non-residential uses in the West End in 2018; then for multiplexes, residential uses in the West End, and the Broadway Plan Area in Fall 2023.
Areas of Vancouver where minimum parking requirements were previously removed.(City of Vancouver)
The change removes a significant step in the development approval process that developers often fault for being too slow.
"Practically every development application requires the applicant to calculate their minimum parking requirement and requires City staff to conduct a review to evaluate whether the application is meeting those requirements," said staff in the report. "Parking requirement calculations are detailed and contribute to a significant amount of time in the preparation and review of a development application. Eliminating the need to calculate and validate whether these complex requirements are being met is expected to simplify and accelerate the development application and review process."
Eliminating minimum parking requirements does not equate to a ban on building new parking, and developers are still expected to provide parking when and where they see a need — such as with strata residential projects, which have historically had a higher demand for vehicle parking than rental projects. Removing parking minimums can also potentially reduce the cost of housing, as not all residential units include a parking space.
Visitor parking requirements and assessibility parking requirements will all remain in place.
As part of the previous round of changes, in Fall 2023, the City of Vancouver also updated its guidelines around transportation demand management (TDM), a tool that allows developers to reduce the parking they need to provide in exchange for providing more bicycle infrastructure, car-share access, or transit passes to residents, as three examples.
The TDM policy is tied to the minimum parking requirements, which now no longer exist. Staff have recommended that the TDM policy not be changed for now, since changes just came into effect on January 1, but are planning to "lower the financial expectation on applicants within the Downtown, Broadway Plan Area, and TOAs" at some point, after receiving further guidance from the Province, which introduced new legislation in April — Bill 16 — that granted local governments new authority over TDM.
Following the removal of minimum parking requirements, which are effective as of June 30, the City says it is expecting many in-stream applications to be revised and that applicants will be required to submit a new application along with the associated fee.
