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The arguments for parking minimums always sound so poorly thought through that they would be laughed out of the park if it weren't for the entrenched tradition.
Parking minimums are based on basically no real data. They were also a significant factor in the destruction of many downtown areas as many buildings were bought, demolished, and turned into surface level parking lots, which is a poor use of valuable land in a downtown core.
Parking minimums also promote overbuilding parking for strip malls, box stores and even residential developments, artificially increasing the amount of land these developments need.
Reporting back by 2028 or sooner sounds like polliticsl speak for " lets not really care about this during our terms/put this off til people forget we said we'd look into it". 5 years is a ridiculous amount of time to study this subject and far too long to wait to start fixing our urban fabric. If parking miniums aren't to be eliminated, they should be significantly reformed to at least try to use some real data and give businesses more flexibility in determining their parking requirements.
We need housing minimums, and market-based solutions to private vehicle parking. Doing the reverse is insane.
How about instead of parking minimums, public transit infrastructure minimums?
This is why my position on the greenbelt is "open it up to any construction but you have to pay to service that construction with frequent rail-based rapid transit instead of cars". Which means green ultra-high-density. Cut and cover some subways out of Aldershot GO and build an new Barcelona around them. Use every part of the Buffalo.
You can do that everywhere, it doesn’t have to be the green belt
Green belt is where we have heavy rail transit infrastructure and no existing neighbours to NIMBY about shadows Character Of The Neighborhood. Go far outside of the GTHA and you're unhooked from the GO system. Do infill and you have to deal with moronic city councils and neighborhood groups and planner BS like in TFA. Green belt is where you can pick a few dozen square KM of land, buy out the few farmers, and build Hyperdrive City. with a GO train to Toronto.
I'm all for infill, I'm just politically realistic that the voters are too dumb to save the planet, and Hyperdrive City is the next-best-thing.
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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