NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Existing parking manually counted on site
2. City of Surrey (1993). Surrey Zoning By-Law 12000. p 5.1 – 5.22
3. VanMap
Surrey Parking Standards
02 Thursday Oct 2014
Posted in Uncategorized
02 Thursday Oct 2014
Posted in Uncategorized
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Existing parking manually counted on site
2. City of Surrey (1993). Surrey Zoning By-Law 12000. p 5.1 – 5.22
3. VanMap
Analysis 
Matt, agree with your analysis and recommendation completely, with just the caveat that a city must have its on-street parking act together before it follows through on your recommendation for off-street. No off-street requirements will put more pressure on on-street parking, so good enforcement and proper demand management (i.e. pricing, timing etc.) is pretty key.
On the YouTube page somebody asked me why only implement this for buildings less than 1,000 square meters. I believe you should ultimately eliminate off-street parking requirements, but my reasoning was that if you eliminated them completely without first getting your on-street parking strategies in order it would likely be a rough transition. So in that sense we are in agreement.
My thought behind the 1,000 square meter limit is that the parking generated by a small commercial use could be absorbed into the existing on-street parking in most situations. I’m going to use a block of Whalley Boulevard between 105a Ave and 107a Ave as an example.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.1962398,-122.8423927,3a,75y,172.61h,80.62t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1simnG7WDyseycT8pRZSd5cw!2e0
This location is about a 10 minute walk from rapid transit and is well served by bike lanes. There is lot’s of existing residential around it and plenty of high density residential coming to the area. It is not far from offices and and a variety of other uses that could generate demand at different times of the day. Based on this somebody might want to acquire a small lot and set up a restaurant, but they don’t want to spend the money to acquire the adjacent property to provide a large parking lot.
The on-street parking is currently unrestricted. Chances are that this one commercial use won’t have a large enough impact to need that to change. If it is successful maybe a few more small commercial uses move into the area. At that point you might have to use restrictive signs and a bit of enforcement to keep things functioning well. As more and more uses move in you might need to put in parking meters. Somebody might develop a parkade to serve the area eventually.
So yes, if you were to dump a parking-free Walmart into an area it would be a disaster. But with small commercial uses you have the ability to ramp up parking regulations over time as the area progresses.
There are countless examples of streets lined with a large number of commercial and mixed use buildings with little or no off-street parking. They are often adjacent to residential neighborhoods and many are poorly served by transit. If you proposed to allow the exact same thing in a new area people would say it would be a parking disaster, yet they seem to mange without much difficulty.
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