As a follow-up to my post on the Transportation Trends report, City staff have provided me with some greater precision on vehicle ownership in the ward.
These numbers are important as we consider the elimination of parking minimums citywide, and particularly here in Kitchissippi as we see an increasing number of applications for low-rise apartment buildings with 12-16 units usually being built with no parking provided.
What the numbers demonstrate clearly is that there are a very significant number of car-free households already in the ward.
There were, in 2022, a total of 18,619 households in Kitchissippi, split almost evenly between those in ground-oriented units (singles, semis, rowhouses – 49.5%) and apartments (which includes condos – 50.5%). In ward 15, there are 4,361 households that don’t have a car. Fully 40% of households, 3,716 in all, in apartments don’t have cars. There are 645 households in singles, semis and rows that don’t have cars.
The frequent objection I hear to no-parking, low-rise apartment buildings when those are proposed is that the tenants will all have cars that contribute to congestion and street parking pressure. The numbers simply don’t bear that out.
The impracticality or not of living car-free depends on a lot of different variables: household income and size, disability, work location and type, the availability of amenities within active or public transit distance and more. An insistence on parking makes housing more expensive, contributes to sprawl and reduces lot greenspace potential. We need more people to be able to live in wards like Kitchissippi that are served by great walkable amenities and transit and cycling infrastructure to reduce the number of kilometers people drive in a year and to ensure the economic sustainability of our infrastructure. We need to build Kitchissippi as a neighbourhood for everyone, and enabling the market to choose whether to provide parking or not is a key piece of that puzzle.