We knew it was coming. But it's important and worth mentioning again. This week, Toronto City Council adopted new Zoning Bylaw Amendments that will remove most parking minimums across the city. We now join many other cities across North America who have done similar things in order to try and encourage more sustainable forms of mobility.
If you'd like to take a spin through the draft amendments, you'll find them linked here. I haven't gone through them in detail, but I did do a word search for "maximum" given that this week's adoption represents a pretty clear change in perspective. Here's an excerpt from the staff recommendation report that speaks to what I'm talking about:
Recognizing these challenges, this review of the parking standards in the city-wide
Zoning By-law 569-2013 was guided by the principle that parking standards should
allow only the maximum amount of automobile parking reasonably required for a given
use and minimums should be avoided except where necessary to ensure equitable
access. The previous review, which began in 2005, was guided by the principle that the
zoning standards should require the minimum responsible amount of parking for a given
land use. This is inconsistent with Official Plan policies which discourage auto
dependence.
One other thing I found in the documents that went to Council was this map of parking spot selling prices in active high-rise developments across the city. Not surprisingly, downtown and midtown are showing the highest prices per parking space. I can't vouch for the accuracy of all of these dots, but it looks directionally right and I can tell you that at least one of them is correct.
All of us in the industry know how much parking drives decision making. There's a joke (half-joke) that when you're designing a building, first you lay out the parking and then you design all of the residential suites around that structural grid. That's not the way things should be done. The future of this city should not and cannot be centered around the car. This week's adoption is in service of that.
My friend Evgeny published a great blog post today called, On Car Ownership And The Future Of Transportation.
And in it he made the argument that instead of buying a car and an expensive downtown Toronto parking spot (average price: $40,000 - 60,000), most of us urbanites would be better of just taking a taxi or Uber.
This got me thinking: At what point does it really make sense to completely forgo owning a car? (Full disclosure: I own both a car and a downtown parking spot.) So I decided to dig into the numbers a bit more and compare 4 mobility options:
Owning a car ($25,000 upfront) + downtown parking spot ($40,000 upfront) and driving yourself everywhere
Taking a regular taxi exclusively ($3.25 base + $1.75 per km)
Taking an UberX exclusively ($2.50 base + $1 per km)
Or, taking a futuristic driverless car everywhere (here I assumed $1.50 base + $0.25 per km)
With the above numbers, I then assumed 15,000 km traveled per year and an average trip length of 15 km (so 1,000 trips per year). The trip length and number of trips per year matter because of the “base fare” that is charged when you take a taxi or Uber.
I also assumed that the cost of owning a car is $0.60 per km (estimated from this Globe and Mail article) and that there is an opportunity cost to NOT renting out your downtown parking spot ($200/month). That is, every month that you spend driving yourself around and parking your car, you are forfeiting parking revenue.
Finally, I looked at a 10 year time horizon and then “discounted” all the costs back to today’s dollars so that I could compare each mobility option.
So what did I find?
What this says is that if you’re driving 15,000 km per year (average trip length 15km), then you’re better off taking UberX everywhere, as opposed to going out, buying a car and parking spot, and driving yourself around.
But does this hold true at different travel distances?
Based on my model, once you hit around 18,000 km per year, then you’re better of with option 1 (owning a car). That’s because the per km savings associated with driving yourself around are enough to offset the upfront costs of the car and parking spot.
On the flip side, when you drop below 7,500 km traveled per year, even a regular taxi starts to make sense. That’s because you’re simply not traveling enough to reap the benefits of owning a car/parking spot. Again, high upfront costs; lower per km operating costs.
Of course, there are a number of things I didn’t consider in my model. For one, most people finance their car and parking spot (it is bundled into their home mortgage). So I’m sure there are ways that you could change the above outcomes using leverage.
At the same time, I didn’t account for the fact that when you’re being driven around (as opposed to driving around) you have the flexibility of doing work, responding to emails, and so on. If you want to attach a value to your time, then the scale would tip back in favor of taxis and Uber.
But all of this was really just to make one point: look how cheap it could be to ride around in a driverless car. When that becomes the reality in our cities, which it will, it’s going to completely transform our current beliefs around cars, parking, and many other things.
I guess that’s why General Motors just invested $500 million in the peer-to-peer ridesharing company, Lyft. They know the shit is coming.