theres surface parking lots in eau claire 40yrs after remediation was done, and probably will be for another 20yrs.
east vic is massive, there is zero need for a $75mm parking lot in a sea empty lots.
its not even remotely close to either bmo or the arena. its an indulgent pet project across the street from city hall. that money couldnt have a worse use other than paying the planners that built it.
consider at the same time on 10th and 4th a parking garage in a much better location is being repurposed with picnic tables.
I forget if this has been answered: was this project a way to move money allocated to a parking garage to something more (including a parking garage)? Funding rules are strange and specific so I vaguely recall a big pot of money that was dedicated to build parkades only and some of that money going to this project. Is that a thing or am I totally wrong?
Regardless it doesn't make it right, as you stated. In no world does Calgary's city centre need more public parking - if parking was the issue the supply we have would have solved it already. Further, future-proofing garages is nice in concept but not really done. Indeed, the City Hall Parkade built in the 1980s was "future proofed" similarly to support a tower.
What I would love to see, is a true parking, supply and demand picture of the city centre. For all our progressive parking accolades I don't think it's been done. CPA might has a sense of their supply and demand due to ParkPlus, but CPA is only be one of many large parking downtown parking lot managers, let alone semi-public or private garages and street parking availability. Without the data this isn't confirmable, but I would bet Calgary's city centre has the most / highest concentration of parking spots in at least Western Canada, despite all our good policy over the years.
I took a 5 minute crack here to estimate parking supply within 500m: the distance from this parkade to the proposed arena. I only looked at CPA and Impark so missed all office towers, condos or any other parking provided by others. No street parking included. It's a rough guess and should be floor estimate, the total
| Lot | Distance to Platform (walking) | Stalls |
| City Hall Parkade | 70m | 640 |
| Lot 79 (next to CPL) | 100m | 31 |
| Lot 78 (next to CPL) | 105m | 33 |
| Lot 77 (next to CPL) | 115m | 24 |
| Lot 55 (North of NMC) | 200m | 347 |
| Arts Commons | 200m | 136 |
| Lot 63B/63C (along 10th Avenue near Village Ice Cream) | 250m | 86 |
| Impark (North of Village Ice Cream) | 150m | 121 |
| Impark (Bow Valley College) | 250m | 214 |
| Impark (Calgary Tower) | 350m | 1398 |
| Impark (Keynote condos | 450m | 388 |
| Impark (Superstore) | 350m | 200 |
| | 3,618 |
So within ~5 minute walk of this parkade we have 3,600+ (and likely many, many more spots with the aforementioned caveats to my low effort research) publicly available parking spots. If we take an assumption of 300 sqft / spot (typical average when including lanes and any ramps) and multiply it by my 3,600 stalls we have over 1 million sqft of parking within a 5 minute walk! That's the size of the 49-storey Eighth Avenue Place East Tower (fun fact EAP: has 1,141 parking stalls of it's own not included in it's sqft I think).
Supply is one side, demand is another with a much trickier. We often lean into measuring demand through qualitative measures ("it's hard to park at the new library!") because it's so tricky to estimate demand. Far more to unpack here I will save for a future rant: demand of what exactly? the parking lot? the library? how do we know the impacts of substitutions (ex. if we built $80M of housing instead of parking, or spent $80M to improve transit service to the area etc.) Way harder! Someone who knows about transportation stuff might want to dig into that one and explain the assumptions behind some rickety parking/traffic models.
The last thing critically important is it's not supply and demand today, it's supply and demand in the future as well. Will the City Centre need these stalls for it's whole design life of 30 to 50 years before we repair the thing or tear it down?
So it's tricky work but I don't see how through supply and demand a conclusion that more parking is a good answer. Even if it's shiny (or maybe not )
