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Originally Posted by puffnstuff
Ok so now that parking has been opened up. Why on earth is it so expensive to park in DT Calgary at City lots? Our rates are on par with NYC and above every other major Canadian center. What's up with that?
As well I posted earlier in the thread about Deerfoot, never saw a response, but that may be due to it being a Provincial thing.
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In the 1960s Calgary implemented a parking policy downtown that restricted the amount of parking that could be built with new commercial development - to limit supply and therefore increase price. The intent was so that they would not have to build massive amounts of road infrastructure in and out of the downtown core to accommodate traffic demand as well as to drive transit ridership on new Blue Arrow bus system they wanted to implement.
In the meantime, Calgary's oil boom produced one of the most heavily concentrated downtown workforces of any city in North America.
So, high demand and intentially low supply means very high prices. Of course we know that the policy has been very successful for its intent. We have a relatively spread out residential population but also very high transit ridership for the downtown. 50% of commuter trips downtown are via transit, 11% are walking or biking and 39% are by car. This is a very high ratio for a western North American city, especially one that is primarily built up post war.
Now of course some will say that this policy is TOO successful. Perhaps more parking can be built (and is planned to be built) but we also have fairly finite road capacity in and out of downtown, unless we want to start bulldozing communities for new highways. So, lots of new parking wouldn't be that helpful anyway.
The policy was incredibly progressive for its time, and on balance has served our city extremely well.