No, you don't need that much parking

On Granville Street in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, an approximately 500-space parking garage is being replaced by a 32-story office tower. Even though the tower will contain up to 1,800 workers, it will have only 133 parking spaces—a quarter of what was customary in Vancouver in the 1960s.

The change reflects the evolution of the city's parking standards, The Globe and Mail reports. Since 1997, Vancouver's transportation plan has capped downtown parking and banned new roads—helping to reduce the number of car trips, even while the number of jobs and the overall number of trips into the city's center have grown.

Nonetheless, some businesses that consider moving into downtown worry about having fewer parking spaces than they've had in car-dependent suburban business parks.

What to do? An executive at a company that builds and leases office buildings has found a partial answer. He introduces the prospective tenant to existing tenants who initially had thought they needed a high level of parking but later discovered that with better transit options, more of their employees ended up commuting by means other than a private car.

Though not guaranteed to succeed, that tactic sometimes wins the prospective tenant over. 

Year by year, the need for parking appears to be declining. City Transportation Engineer Jerry Dobrovolny says many of the underground parking areas of commercial buildings have a high vacancy rate. A recent large increase in the tax on use of parking garages in Vancouver has also helped to discourage car trips.

For more in-depth coverage on this topic: 

• Subscribe to Better! Cities & Towns to read all of the articles (print+online) on implementation of greener, stronger, cities and towns.

• See the October-November 2011 issue of New Urban News (as our print newsletter was known for 15 years). Topics: HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods, Parking reform, transit-oriented parking policy, Obama vs. Congress, West Virginia town revitalizes, suburb remakes its center, ecological dividend, cul-de-sac makeover, thoroughfare manual, and much more.

• Get New Urbanism: Best Practices Guide, packed with more than 800 informative photos, plans, tables, and other illustrations, this book is the best single guide to implementing better cities and towns.

• See the September 2011 issue of New Urban News. Topics: Walk Score, sprawl retrofit, livability grants, Katrina Cottages, how to get a transit village built, parking garages, the shrinking Wal-Mart, Complete Streets legislation, an urban capital fund, and much more.