Today in the Sun: Twist in Vancouver’s car culture gives new spin to getting around town
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Reflecting a growing reluctance to take on the expense of car ownership, Vancouver car co-ops are fast revving up in the business and mixed-use market – enabling retail developers to plan for town-centre features as opposed to vast grey swaths of parking lot.
It’s just not practical anymore for businesses to allow for daily employee parking, says Phil Baudin, executive director, Modo The Car Co-op, which has 320 cars in Metro Vancouver for 10,000 member drivers. …
The trend to bike, walk, take transit or use car co-ops has led to the burgeoning of pedestrian-friendly, community-oriented town-centre developments like the future Oakridge, says Graeme Silvera, Ivanhoe Cambridge’s vice president, Retail Development, Western Region.
“We basically wanted to take a very aggressive approach in terms of trying to reduce parking demand on the site. As a result, we had to come up with a scenario that supported that, and one of the key things is the car coop,” says Silvera. …
… Ivanhoe Cambridge wanted to avoid the situation Marine Gateway got itself into: an oversupply of parking spots.
Marine Gateway was “the first development to basically decouple parking stalls from a unit sale. So when you bought something at Marine Gateway, you didn’t actually have to buy a parking stall. What they found out was they ended up with about 250 surplus parking stalls that nobody bought. That’s about $5 million of capital investment that you’ve put into the ground that essentially cannot be recovered. They ended up, I think, assigning those stalls just a general retail, theatre and the office because they didn’t know what to do with them. So, they’re overparked.
… Silvera dates the crumbling of Oakridge’s park-and-drive culture to the opening of SkyTrain’s Canada Line in 2009. Before that, “we had about nine or 10 per cent of the people who came to the mall using transit. After Canada Line, that number jumped to 40 per cent. And what that did, is it created a whole bunch of this surplus parking on the site.”
That surplus is in for a major transformation. When the retail makeover is completed in 2020 – with residential completion projected for 2025 – cyclists will find the Heather Street bikeway rerouted right through the site. Separated bike lanes will run along the whole frontage of 41st, and also down Cambie. …
Currently there are five stalls per thousand feet of leasable area at Oakridge. “We’ve negotiated with all the anchor tenants on the site to bring the ratio down to 3.5, to basically meet observed demand. I would love to have brought them to 2.5,” says Silvera, who projects fewer spaces being used as the next generation gets its drivers’ licences – and goes co-op.
“My son right now has no intention of buying a car. I’ve explained to him the actual cost of car ownership and that most of the revenue from his first job, most of the salary, would go into simply owning and maintaining that car. There’s insurance, and then there’s the actual cost. It’s somewhere between $7,500 and $10,000 a year if you finance or lease a car, with all the ownership and gas, and everything that goes with that.
“So when you look at that, the cost to join a car coop is going to be somewhere around a hundred bucks a month, a pretty easy value proposition, from that standpoint. I think the next generation is recognizing, ‘Why do I actually need a car?’ ”
I’ve asked it before, and I’ll ask it again, if being transit oriented is so important why was the Oakridge redevelopment allowed to place the retail component so far from the rapid transit station? They’re at the far corners of the site, rather than where they should be – directly beside the station. Whereas the residential should be behind, farther from the busy arterial roads, not beside them.
Interesting……Makes sense, would be good to hear their side of the story
The towers step back from the intersection – residents don’t want shadowing.(so blame them).
The entire Oakridge site isn’t all that big. The walking distance between the stores and the station is short – people are going to be strolling through the mall anyways.
If the distance in question were considered too long, you won’t have people shopping at Costcos where the store itslef is just as big.
The catchment area (comfortable walking distance) to any rapid transit station is typically set at 400m by the transit experts.
The reason its laid out this way? Its easier to build new retail on the giant parking lot before tearing down the existing shopping area to maintain continuity for tenants. It all comes down to money, keeping revenue flowing in during construction, simplifying construction by not swapping out one retail area for another in the same space.
I live in the opposite direction from the station, so personally that walk of 3-4 blocks southwest to visit Safeway, then walking backtracking extra blocks northeast home with groceries is an annoyance. And poor design. New West Station gets it right, the stores are *right there* at the station.
Car coops and/or Car2Go make total sense. I use Car2Go a fair bit and we downsized from two cars to one since moving back to Vancouver five years ago.
What is not stated for the Marine Gateway project is that many ( Asian ) investors sit on the asset empty for years and/or rent it. So, why pay for a stall ? Renters then are forced to park the cars in the neighborhood. You can see the same at UBC S-Campus which were intentionally built with far too few underground parking spots and now the narrow roads are crowded and parking is all over the place as it is free on the streets, and poorly enforced.
What is missing in Vancouver is sizable parking fees on every street and a requirement to prove where you will park your car once you get registration. That is common in Japan’s crowded cities, for example. Vancouver could learn from other cities, such as Tokyo, here.
What also has to happen is road tolling as gasoline taxes alone, especially for hybrid, fuel efficient or e-cars are far too low to pay for required road/tunnel/bridge construction and maintenance. So, the MetroVan MayorsCouncil is on the right track here in their proposal to the myopic provincial government.
An interesting observation regarding the 250 parking stalls that the article says were not purchased at the time of the sale of the residential units in Marine Gateway: the 250 residential stalls represent 67% of the total number of 373 residential stalls in the project. Now, the Sun reporter is quoting Graeme Silvera of Ivanhoe Cambridge, which is not affiliated with the Marine Gateway project, so I would take the conveniently-round 250 number with a grain of salt and treat it as anecdotal, but I wholly believe the general thrust of his argument that he doesn’t want his project team for the Oakridge redevelopment to find itself holding the bag on millions, or tens of millions of dollars’ worth of unsold residential parking.
If Silvera’s Marine Gateway parking statistic can be confirmed, let alone found in the future to be relatively consistent when parking is decoupled from housing on projects adjacent to rapid transit, then it will be a remarkable local example of the invisible hand of the market providing feedback on parking policy. Considering that Marine Gateway sold out on its opening day, I would suspect a large proportion of the buyers were likely investors, so it remains to be seen whether tenants or subsequent owner-occupant buyers may wish to lease or buy parking spaces. Hopefully the developer has devised a flexible method for handling the sale of parking spots in the future.
Regarding my source for the total 373 stalls associated with the residential component of the project, I found it in the project’s Development Permit Board application: http://former.vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/dpboard/2011/PDFs/400%20SW%20Marine%20Drive-DE415055.pdf
One would think Silvera would have actually taken the time to have a look at his parking lot’s usage on weekend afternoons. As it is, it seems like’s only observed it on Tuesday mornings.
There’s a difference between stalls that nobody (investors) bought – and stalls that nobody (tenants) wants.
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.
Usually a parking space is an asset, and if unused by a tenant, can be rented out by the tenant. If they are in short supply in the building, you’d think that they’d be a more valuable asset (when the building is finally occupied) and command a hgher rent.