By building an urban place, joined by transit:
Prime On The Plaza in Surrey City Centre has only sold 15 of the 210 parking stalls reserved for its 274 micro-suites (micro-suites are just under 300 square feet). Prime has sold 222 of the micro-suites.
Stovell attributed the poor sales of parking stalls in part to the building’s prime location: once the building is completed, residents will be within easy walking distance of SkyTrain, shopping, the campus of Simon Fraser University, and the North Surrey Recreation Centre. Many residents, he believes, will be able to live their lives without owning a car and therefore don’t need a parking stall.
- Vancouver Sun
It’s the basis of the regional plan, it’s what we voted against in the transit referendum, and it’s what the Province is working to negate with its commitment to Motordom
Given that you often hear that parking stalls take $20-50k to build … thats a painful $4-$10Million difference between requirement and reality. Multiplied across a region is enough to give one a headache thinking of the wasted resources.
You are right, for underground parking. On the surface they are usually between $2,500-$4,500.
The target demographic is probably also a factor – if you are budget conscious enough to live in a 300 sq ft suite, then you probably won’t have the money necessary to maintain and insure a car.
I assume that the building is almost all micro-suites?
You’d think the number would be proportional to the number of larger units.
One possible solution would be for the developer to retain the upper levels of parking as a commercial public pay parking lot (across from Surrey City Centre library and eventually office buildings) while the lower levels could be secured for condo use (the same way that many mixed use buildings have retail parking on the upper levels and resident parking below).
There seems to be quite a lot of success with reserved car share spaces for exclusive use of residents. No word on if this was thought of (or rejected) here, or if they had done enough research on the demand for private transport in developments within a 5-minute walk of rapid transit.
Each parking spot occupies about 150 sq ft not including access lanes. So a car gets over half the space of a person. We see the same in office buildings, where employees are crammed into tiny cubicles while the cars relish way larger space. Motordon indeed.