Editor:
No, we don’t need 14 stories of parking at the 80-storey building going up at Lougheed. We only need the bare minimum.
According to Burnaby’s own transportation plan, our goal is to have three-quarters of all trips on transit or active transportation by 2050. If we don’t start working towards that now, that target won’t just magically happen in the future. It’s much harder to repurpose parking as something else instead of getting it right from the get-go. Keep in mind this building is going across the street from a SkyTrain station, the perfect location for people to get to it without a car.
Parking is incredibly expensive. Each of these city-mandated stalls costs around $100,000 to build, driving up the cost of housing (pun intended). The vast majority of trips within the city don’t require dragging around a steel-encased living room on wheels, but everyone needs a place to sleep. Yet the city acts like there is a parking crisis instead of a housing crisis and forces buildings like this to have more parking than homes. Many live perfectly fine without a personal car (myself included) and will happily move somewhere without a designated parking spot.
Among the planned parking spots, 1,612 are residential and 1,067 are commercial. It’s a waste of space to have parking separated when the residential spots will be mostly empty during the day and the commercial spots will be mostly empty at night. No matter how it’s labelled, a parking stall is an eight-by-18-foot rectangle of concrete, and its only purpose is car storage.
Private vehicles are a totally inefficient way to move around in a city. They are noisy, create pollution, and have all kinds of negative health effects. Some might think electric vehicles solve these problems, but they don’t. Regardless of what type of motor is in a car, it takes up the same amount of space, and at speeds above 30 km/h, most of the noise comes from rolling tires and wind, and those tires also produce particle pollution.
Electric cars are 33 per cent heavier than normal cars, so that 14-storey parkade will need to be much stronger than parkades of the past. Heavier vehicles cause more wear and tear on the road and create more potholes. Heavier cars are also even more dangerous than normal cars, which are already the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged five to 29 years. In B.C., car crashes kill over 270 people and injure 87,000 every year.
Eliminating parking minimums isn’t something new. Edmonton has even implemented parking maximums. We should be embarrassed that Alberta is doing better than us at this.
The research showing that parking is terrible for the climate is indisputable. Earth just hit the horrible record of the hottest day ever for three days in a row! Right here in B.C., 619 of our neighbours died in the heat dome and four people died in mudslides, floods killed 600,000 animals and caused billions of dollars in damage! Not to mention the wildfires and smoke that our children now grow up with, which also killed a nine-year-old and a 19-year-old last week.
The effects of the climate crisis are here and now, and they will continue to get worse unless we change for the better. To build such a ridiculous amount of parking is climate arson.
Michelle Scarr
