Quebec is neither a country nor winter: Quebec is a large parking lot. Like the rest of North America, what.
Estimates have just counted six parking spaces on average per car in the United States, with a record of 30 spaces per vehicle in Houston. In total, there would therefore be more than 2 billion boxes made in USAthe equivalent of the states of Vermont and Connecticut combined.
Applying this six-space rule here—there are about five million cars to park—we would therefore be at one gigaparking than 30 million spaces in Quebec, where, like everywhere in the world, beautiful tanks spend 95% of their time stationary. At three spaces per car, according to a conservative estimate, we still arrive at a minimum overall total of 15 million paved spaces.
The Regional Council for the Environment of Montreal (CREM) has made the precise accounts for this city (and not for the whole island). The study, released in March, arrives at a total of around one million spaces, half on-street and half off-street. Each of these spaces occupies an average of 32.5 m2for a large combined whole of at least 22 km2 reserved for stopped cars, the equivalent of the Plateau-Mont-Royal and Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie boroughs.
This last borough would have approximately 35,000 spaces in the public domain, including nearly 1,100 with parking meters, according to data provided by its communications division. The stickers brought in $620,500 in 2022. A new fee schedule based on vehicle type and net mass (rather than engine capacity) will come into effect in July.
There, as elsewhere, cars are in increasing demand for space since they are more and more numerous and bigger and bigger. Vehicles in motion looking for a space make up 30% of traffic in some parts of major cities.
The paved continent hides a thousand and one development problems. “A lot of our urban problems are still related to places to store individual cars”, comments Christian Savard, general manager of Vivre en ville, an organization for the defense of best urban planning practices. “Do we want to make cycle lanes? We can’t because we want to keep street parking. Do we want to green our cities to refresh them? You cannot remove the places to store the cars. And why are our suburbs not beautiful? Because we established the car park as king and master everywhere. »
Another example: Communauto complains that the administrative delays in approving new places to park its vehicles are slowing down the expansion of its services. Shared cars, which travel frequently, are therefore slowed down by private cars, which hardly move.
Mr. Savard says he chose his profession as an urban planner when he became aware of the ugliness of developing a shopping center in Saint-Hubert (a city now integrated into Longueuil), on the South Shore. “I found it terribly ugly and I decided to fight against this kind of horror. “He was 10 years old…
A very expensive free
The vast majority of public spaces remain occupied free of charge or at low cost by parked vehicles. Californian professor Donald Shoup (The High Cost of Free Parkingg, 2015) estimated that the loss of revenue from free parking spaces in the United States was US$233 to 718 billion in 2017. CREM estimates that the support for the car collectively assumed by free on-street parking is around half a billion a year in Montreal alone.
In the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough, the price of a sticker varies according to the period of validity and the type of vehicle. It costs between $88.53 (for an electric car) and $297.79 for large cars. Making a vehicle sleep all year round, or almost, therefore costs its owner the equivalent of one night in a downtown hotel. In Montreal, only about 5% of spaces require vignettes and another 5% require parking meters. This means that 90% of parking spaces are available.
“The potential for construction and new income is enormous for the city,” explains Blaise Rémillard, responsible for mobility and urban planning at CREM. He specifies that in the central districts, 30% of the inhabitants do not have a car, and 30% park their car on their private land. “It is therefore a minority that benefits from public space, and at minimal cost. In fact, if the City wanted to provide parking service to all cars, it could not: the streets are full. It is therefore an excessive subsidy which only benefits a minority. »
In Quebec, as everywhere in North America, rules and laws often support this privatization of public space, or quite simply the development of new places for cars. US data shows that cars are sometimes allowed twice as much space as employees in workplaces.
The construction of garages linked to high-rise buildings can add up to 25% to the cost of housing, a cost spread over all co-owners, whether they own a car or not. Thus, the Royalmount project, under construction in the center of the island of Montreal, responds laconically to the demands of the Duty that the development plans to apply the municipal regulations of Mount Royal. There will therefore be at least one space per 43 square meters of rental area, and at most one space per 35 square meters of apartment. At the latter count, each car will have about as much space as each of the residents.
Examples to follow
That said, notable efforts exist to diversify the use of spaces along the street. The spokesperson for the City of Montreal cites concrete cases from recent years: “The securing of intersections and the surroundings of schools, the deployment of the Réseau express vélo (REV), the establishment of reserved lanes for buses, the granting permits for the installation of outdoor cafés and placottoirs, greening, and the installation of bicycle parking spaces and bike-sharing stations (Bixi)”, wrote to the Duty publicist Hugo Bourgoin.
The Montreal Master Plan limits the parking supply in the Ville-Marie borough. The Plateau borough has prohibited the development of new spaces behind houses since the turn of the decade.
In his Mobility White Paper from March 2023, the Regional Council for the Environment is proposing a requalification of part of the parking lots, new pricing and new regulations for these spaces occupied by stopped vehicles. The Council recommends gradually making all on-street parking on the island of Montreal chargeable by 2035, according to the simple principle of user-pays for these public spaces. Montreal had 17,300 paid spaces on the street in 2016, and another 6,300 off-street in 2022.
“We must adequately price parking lots with parking meters, vignettes, or through eco-taxation by taxing artificial surfaces to minimally cover the real costs of these spaces,” says Mr. Savard of Vivre en ville. We abuse everything that is free. »
The CREM also encourages the transformation of these mineralized spaces in an eco-responsible way, either by eliminating them, or by developing them differently, or by greening them and sharing the use for pedestrians and cyclists. “There are plenty of places where there is too much parking, or just enough, but for very occasional occupations,” says Mr. Rémillard. We don’t do greenwashing. The approach is consistent: we want to reduce the spaces, reduce car travel and, in the end, have a responsible layout. »
According to him, the Rodrigue-Gilbert arena in Pointe-aux-Trembles is the most successful recent example (2018), with an eco-responsible parking certificate. An agreement with a neighboring school has made it possible to share spaces and reduce parking spaces by 40% in favor of the construction of a new youth centre. The result includes 20% more green space, around fifty trees, safe furniture for pedestrians and cyclists, preferential places for electric vehicles, permeable flooring, etc.
The architects of Groupe Rousseau Lefevre even created oblique perspectives reminiscent of the skating strokes of the arena. The result has its effect. “Many companies invest in their entrance hall by neglecting the route to get to the building,” notes Mr. Rémillard. Mr. Savard, he understood that at 10 years old…