Toronto's Green Surface Parking Design Guidelines

A recent Toronto Star article titled “City approves new guidelines for eco-friendly parking lots” (link to article) reported on the release of Toronto’s new design guidelines for greening surface parking lots. (link to design guidelines). After reading the article, I was compelled to find them to see what they were all about. The lack of enforcement seems to be their biggest shortcoming. Most of the guides contents are an overview of policies and design suggestions for creating better parking lots. While I applaud the creation of the guidelines, their idea of being green seemed to have more to do with landscaping than anything else. They reminded me of your typical above average American suburb parking lot design guidelines with a touch of sustainable design practices thrown in for good measure. Stormwater management gets less than three pages out of the 40 page booklet and permeable pavement gets even less. The parking lot examples were helpful, but the designs were underwhelming. Since parking makes up a large percentage of the land uses in many cities and has a huge impact on storm water quality and quantity, not to mention its impact on the urban heat island effect, it is an important topic to address. So it is a step in the right direction, I just wanted and expected more.

While reading it, I was reminded of The Chicago Green Alley Handbook (link to document)which recently won ASLA’s 2007 Communications Honor Award (link to ASLA Awards summary page). The Toronto guidelines could have learned a lot from it user friendly and inspiring prototypical designs. It is a great introduction to creating more sustainable infrastructure.

Spacings also had a post on the guidelines, the author suggested incentivizing the guidelines by enacting a parking fee in some form that could then be reduced if the guidelines were followed. Other cities have enacted stormwater fees that could then be reduced if stormwater best management practices (BMPs) were implemented. In conjunction with other requirements like a landscape ordinance that requires trees and landscaping, they would go a long way in implementing the design guidelines. I would also like to see parking requirements addressed. I am not familiar with Toronto’s, but in many cases too much parking is required. In other cases tenants demand more parking than may be necessary. Reducing the number of parking spaces would eliminate the need for mitigating the impact of them all together. So we need to make sure we provide adequate parking, but not an excessive amount that is rarely if ever used. Shared parking, mixing uses, municipal garages, and/or on-street parking could also help reduce off –street parking requirements. A ran across a 2005 report from the University of Connecticut by Wesley E. Marshall, P.E. and Norman W. Garrick, Ph.D.titled Parking at Mixed-Use Centers in Small Cities (link to report, Ms Word Doc) that looks at parking demand. It is worth reading.