Park your expectations

As much as I love every idiosyncratic individual who lives in this weird little, weather-beaten town, I have to wonder where Winnipeggers get their bizarre ideas about parking.

People who are born and raised in this place seem to believe it’s their God-given right to drive up to the front of any restaurant, retail store or doctor’s office and immediately find a free and convenient place to park, as if walking a few metres would constitute some form of undue hardship and dropping a loonie or two in a pay station will force them to stop contributing to their retirement plans.

Contrary to the stereotype, I don’t believe Winnipeggers are cheap. But I do believe we’re idiots when it comes to our expectations about parking.

Maybe it was the pathetically slow growth in the 1980s and ’90s. Maybe it’s the apocryphal "discount mentality" that supposedly governs our spending choices. But for some reason, many of us believe we’re entitled to park for free anywhere and any time we like — without stopping to consider the cost of such an entitlement.

Like most North American cities, Winnipeg was built to accommodate primarily one mode of transportation: the personal automobile. And there’s little we can do to change this fact, no matter how many bike trails and busways we decide to build.

That’s because our back lanes, streets and boulevards only comprise one component of our automobile-enabling infrastructure. Parking stalls are even more ubiquitous, as they line every residential street, sprawl over every surface lot and get crammed into the concrete confines of parkades.

Yet, Winnipeggers seem to feel we don’t have enough of these empty spaces, simply because we’ve grown accustomed to finding them empty more often than not. And that in itself is mildly insane.

Now before you wonder what the heck I’m blabbering about, consider how parking stalls became such a common facet of both urban and suburban landscapes. Way back in the early 20th century, when assembly-line automobiles became relatively affordable, the antecedents of our city planners believed there would have to be places to put all these new contraptions.

As fate would have it, the planners from all over North America decided every new commercial building in their respective cities needed to have as much room for the cars outside as there was floor space for people inside.

While this formula varied from one commercial use to another, the effect was generally the same: New buildings meant new parking lots, and new parking lots meant less density. And less density meant people had to take more cars to get around to more places.
And on and on the spiral went, until cities as diverse as Los Angeles, Miami and Winnipeg have all become troublesome to negotiate on foot if you dare to leave their struggling inner cores.

As contrarian planner Donald Shoup hammers home in his textbook The High Cost of Free Parking, the North American expectation that all parking should be free belies the fact we all pay dearly for this commodity in the form of hidden costs, from the taxes we pay to build more roads to support sprawling cities to the higher prices we pay for both goods and services that have been inflated by the higher property taxes businesses are forced to pay to support artificially large footprints.

If we actually paid up front for parking — as we do on downtown streets and in parkades — we’d get a sense of the true cost of this commodity. But instead, we switch off our brains and demand more of the bad urban medicine we’ve been swallowing for decades.

Two years ago, Winnipeg had a chance to remedy this situation when planners overhauled the Winnipeg Zoning Bylaw, a land-use blueprint that functions as a development bible. But the authors continued to demand more parking, requiring yet another overhaul of the bylaw by the time an even bigger-picture development blueprint called Our Winnipeg comes into effect in 2011.

The people who run this city are promising the next big plan will be more environmentally friendly. But these geniuses held a "sustainability symposium" only one month after city council approved the massive big-box development known as the IKEA project.

That development alone calls for 7,517 parking stalls, which is an awful lot of empty concrete — and an awful lot of "free" parking enabled by $22 million in city and provincial spending on nearby street widenings and new traffic signals.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca