Kitchener asks: Is there too much parking?
KITCHENER — Kitchener’s five city-owned parking garages are underused and charge the highest monthly rates in town, but officials are still earmarking millions of dollars to build a sixth garage in 2026.
At budget talks this week, though, city councillors made it clear they’re very skeptical of spending any money to increase city-owned parking.
“Quite frankly, I can’t imagine sitting around this horseshoe and approving a parking garage without some very significant and compelling arguments,” said Coun. Kelly Galloway-Sealock at this week’s budget meeting, as she moved to shift more of the profits from the city parking enterprise back into city coffers.
Kitchener has five parking garages downtown. At least two of them often sit half-empty: one of the newest, at Charles and Benton streets, averages about 36 per cent occupancy, while the garage at the market averages 52 per cent. That’s for monthly parkers, said parking manager Paul McCormick. The industry standard is 85 per cent.
Occupancy in the 2,500 spots in city-owned surface parking lots averages 53 per cent.
There’s a massive oversupply of parking downtown: the city added 1,130 new spots when it built the garages on Charles and below the Queen Street library, and turned a former public works yard on Bramm Street into a parking lot.
The city garages charge the highest monthly parking rates in town. To prevent further erosion of its market share, Kitchener hasn’t increased those rates since at least 2015.
Despite all this, city officials say it makes sense for the city to be in the business of providing parking.
City forecasts project that as the downtown builds in, the core could be short anywhere from 350 to 600 parking spots by 2025.
Private developments build parking for their own uses: office parking is busy during the day, while residential parking fills up at night. But a publicly owned garage can serve both needs, and is therefore more efficient, said Justin Readman, Kitchener’s interim director of infrastructure.
The city plans to eventually phase out all of its 18 surface parking lots downtown, since vast stretches of pavement aren’t the best use of downtown land, Readman said. As condos, offices and shops get built onto those lots, they’ll bring more people downtown, some of whom will be looking for parking.
But it’s not always possible for private developments to provide all the needed parking. Parking garages are expensive — $35,000 to $65,000 per spot — and not all sites can accommodate it. It’s impossible to put underground parking below a heritage building such as the Walper Hotel, and some parts of downtown have shallow water tables, he said.
Just because the city is budgeting for a sixth parking garage doesn’t mean it will ever get built, Readman stressed.
The city wants LRT to be successful. It’s revamping its cycling master plan this year to encourage more people to get out of their cars. Planning policies encourage “complete” development with workplaces, shops and homes, to reduce the need for cars.
“Our goal is not to have to build it,” Readman said. “It’s in the budget forecast as a line item to prepare for a worst-case scenario.”
Many factors could change the demand for parking: if millennials decide they want cars as they start having kids, parking demand could jump; if autonomous vehicles become popular, parking demand could drop as the cars shuttle from customer to customer.
And the city’s forecasts can be way off. The city built the Charles and Benton garage — the city’s largest with 500 spots — in anticipation of increased demand in the east end of downtown as well as from the new provincial courthouse. But both that garage and the other east-end garage at the market are underused. The city’s newest forecasts predict that there will still be hundreds more parking spots than needed in the east end, until at least 2025.
So city officials say it’s merely prudent to budget for another garage, monitor demand closely and adjust parking forecasts as things unfold.
Despite all of these factors, the parking enterprise is making a net profit for the city, Readman points out — it was $409,000 in the black in 2017.