The Future of Visitor Parking - by Councillor Lily Cheng, seconded by Councillor Jennifer McKelvie

Having sufficient visitor parking is very important to ensure that people with visitors have somewhere for their visitors to park. Further, we want to ensure there is sufficient visitor parking to encourage social interactions rather than presenting visitor parking challenges that could exacerbate the already serious social isolation that is happening in our city. For example, recently a developer in Willowdale proposed a 44-storey tower with 513 units with only 7 visitor parking spots, which we negotiated up to 14 spots. I believe this will still be too low to meet the demand of the residents of the building in an inner-suburb context. The impact of limited visitor parking will spill over to the surrounding areas resulting in illegal parking or having no parking left for visitors of those who live in longstanding surrounding communities. Taxpayers will have to absorb the costs of dealing with these challenges created by the cost savings enjoyed by developers in offering limited visitor parking in new high-density developments. This motion requests staff to look into the greater need for visitor parking in suburban wards as part of their ongoing review of the parking requirements in the Zoning By-law.