Creating Constructive Conversations

Many of us feel strongly about parking. Whether it’s a disagreement over who can park in front of whose house or concerns about new development causing parking congestion, it’s a topic that causes a lot of conflict.

While working as a senior planner at the City of Edmonton, I spent two years leading a review of the city’s minimum parking requirements. Given the high emotions around parking, this could have been a project mired in controversy, but instead it was one of the most successful projects I’ve had the opportunity to be part of. It resulted in Edmonton becoming the first major city in Canada to introduce open option parking, an accomplishment that was recently recognized with a National Award for Planning Excellence. 

Open option parking means that new homes and businesses can choose how many stalls they provide on their property, instead of having a set minimum number of parking spaces required by the City. This change is a big deal because minimum parking requirements have been shaping North American cities for decades, despite very little evidence that the standards reflect actual parking needs. The requirements add cost to projects and create major barriers to new businesses opening. Minimum parking standards also result in more spread out communities with limited choices for getting around. Open option parking, conversely, supports more affordable homes and businesses, more walkable communities, more dynamic main streets, and more climate resilient places.

I’m proud of the work I did to bring open option parking to Edmonton - and not just because it will allow us to build stronger and smarter communities. I’m proud because I helped create a process where we could come together as a community to take on this controversial topic. The approach I took to this parking project is a great example of how I think we can structure more meaningful and constructive community conversations.  

One of the most important things we did as a team was make sure we asked the right question. Rather than focus on the details of parking, we asked Edmontonians about the type of communities they wanted to live in. This allowed us to shift the conversation from the exact number of stalls on each property and instead think strategically about the long term vision we have for our communities and the role parking plays in achieving those goals.

Another important part of this conversation involved asking Edmontonians to balance trade-offs. It’s easy to say we should have more parking, but what if that comes at the expense of walkable neighbourhoods or the affordability of homes? Framing choices around trade-offs is an essential way to ensure we have reasonable expectations about what outcomes different decisions can achieve.

The final key action we took was collecting data about current parking use across the city. What we found was that, while some parking lots may be more congested than others, there was an overall abundance of parking spaces across the city. Having this rigorous, technical data allowed us to ground our discussions in reality and make well informed choices. 

My work on open option parking is a great example of the approach to decision making I’m excited to bring to City Council. There are many more discussions about parking that we need to have, particularly on how we manage street parking in our communities. As hard as these conversations might be, I know we can create constructive conversations by finding common ground. A focus on long-term goals, honest discussions about trade-offs, and evidence based decision making will allow us to build our communities stronger, smarter, together.

p.s. if you’d like to learn more about the open option parking project, check out this talk I gave that delves into all the details.