Parking Policy for Sustainable, Accessible Communities
Creators: name: Fahmy, Ayman
name: Olegario Nazareth, Farrah
name: Dyck, Michaela
Publisher: name: The University of British Columbia
Year: 2021

description: Wesbrook Place is a growing residential neighbourhood. The influx of new residents and planning for future residents has effects on how the neighbourhood grows as a sustainable neighbourhood. To reduce future environmental impacts and increase livability in the area, our report provides insights on existing transportation modes and their availability, literature reviews and case studies as precedence for successful planning. Our specific area of study in this report is the residential parking policy and parking demand within the Wesbrook Place residential neighhourhood. The existing alternative modes of transportation in the vicinity of Wesbrook Place were also examined, which ranges from public transit, car-share operators, and cycling infrastructure. From a cursory review, one would suspect there are sufficient alternative modes of transportation serving Wesbrook Place. However, there are limitations with each of these modes of transportation including frequency of transit trips, availability of car-share vehicles and/or bike-share bicycles and cycling infrastructure. We decided to study case studies across British Columbia, the City of Darmstadt in Germany, and the US cities of Miami, New York, and Seattle to get a broader outlook of how the developments of different urban planning initiatives took shape and have achieved success. The opportunities identified which could be relevant for Wesbrook Place include the use of incentives through policy to reduce parking requirements in exchange for access to alternative modes of transportation, manage parking needs based on peak demand times between different building occupancy types and practice stakeholder engagement to understand the resident’s future outlook for Wesbrook and what their insight as a collective means to the growth of the neighbourhood. Based on the results of the literature review and case study review, we have noted a number of innovations and/or incentives programs that have been successful in other jurisdictions and can be applied to some extent to Wesbrook Place. The depth of our research and insight from our survey results has given us the opportunity to develop key performance indicators to measure the use of vehicle for transport and the frequency of visitors to the neighbourhood in order to provide feedback in developing new parking policy. Our final recommendations are outlined with a short term and long term outlook. The short term actions include an action plan towards identifying key KPI’s that can deduce a data analysis based on resident behaviour and actions. Our long term outlook proposes to include stakeholder engagement and draft tiered policy changes. The incremental changes with resident champions will allow for a smoother transition towards enacting new policies while still working with UBC’s initiatives e.g. UBC’s Green Building Action Plan. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”