Adopting the Japanese Parking Model in Victoria
I have written before about on-street parking and some of my challenges with it. My continuing biggest grievance remains with ‘Residential Parking Only’ zones, because I don’t think that we should be giving exclusive use of a public good to a limited, privileged part of society. You can read my article on that here. Beyond that, there are other issues I have with on-street parking; it is ugly, it encourages car ownership beyond what is necessary because finding a spot to park is easy; and finally it discourages using alternative transportation modalities because finding a place to park is assured before taking the trip. There are benefits to on-street parking and it is important to acknowledge them; it provides a physical barrier between car traffic and pedestrian spaces; it can provide a low-cost parking spot for car owners that may not have access to a private parking spot; and it provides close-to-destination access for those with physical challenges that choose to use private automobiles. On-street parking is an assumed convenience in much of the world, but what if there was an alternative? Could there be benefits to a world where there was no on-street parking? There is at least one place where this alternative reality exists: Japan.
It took me awhile to appreciate how different Japan is from the rest of the world, and it wasn’t really until I started to do more street photography here is Victoria that I really noticed the difference. I would be out shooting photos downtown and one thing that I felt was always holding my pictures back would be when there was a great scene, but there was a car parked in it. You can sometimes make it work, it just has to be the right car, in the right place. Even worse was when I would find a great set-up with no cars and just before I would have my composition, a car would pull in. I follow quite a few street photographers around the world and some of my favourites are in Japan. I kept looking at their photos and seeing a great composition and thinking how lucky they were to get so many great shots without cars in them. Then I saw a comment to a post that mentioned how beneficial the Japanese parking system was to street photography. I stopped, what are they talking about? I did some quick reading and learned that in Japan for the most part, there is no street parking. I quickly went to Google Maps and started dropping into street view all over the country in different cities, on different roads, both urban and suburban and was stunned. No parked cars anywhere. What was going on? That is when I learned about the Japanese parking model.
The Japanese parking model essentially prohibits all on-street parking with some exceptions for daytime and evening parking, where permitted. There is also a rule that forbids overnight street parking after 3am in the whole country. The larger and more important part of the law requires everyone to demonstrate that they have a legal off-street parking spot before they can purchase a car, those spots can be owned or rented, but they will not register your vehicle without this proof. This requirement means that if you don’t have access to an off-street parking spot for your car, you cannot get a car. There are a number of benefits that I can see to this rule.
The onus is on the person wanting a car to find a place to park it in advance of purchasing a car. This means that if you already have a car in your family, a second car is not only going to be expensive, it may have to be parked inconveniently far away which may negate any perceived benefit from having a access to it. This means that car ownership on the whole is significantly reduced. Per capita car ownership in Japan is 660 per 1000 people. In Canada that number is 790 per 1000 people, the US is even higher. This means that you have less people driving overall and less vehicles overall are consumed, which both would have dramatic impacts on CO2 emissions. Canada is currently ranked 7th overall for CO2 emissions, Japan is at 26.
This rule necessitates having better public transit both within and between cities. Both of these are very well used in Japan. One can wonder whether there is good public transit due to lower car ownership or whether low car ownership created better public transit, but a hint comes in that these parking rules were created in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Either way having parking limitations like Japan requires any jurisdiction to invest significantly in public transit so that people can still move around the city with ease.
A final benefit comes in land use. A large portion of Victoria is paved asphalt for cars. We have broad streets for allowing both a significant amount of vehicles to move along them, but also to allow the sides of the roads to be used to park cars. When you look at urban streets in Japan, you can see that the roads are narrower, allowing for the sidewalks to be larger and for the buildings to be closer together. This creates more efficient land use overall and as there is more land to build on, it lowers the cost of that land. The poor land use we see in Victoria is one of the main reasons that I oppose height restrictions in the city. Many people say that we should be building our cities to ‘European’ scale, with high density, but while I can appreciate lower buildings, it is our current road system that prevents that from being option. By building shorter buildings we are simply lowering our land efficiency as compared to Europe (or Japan) where you would see narrower roads that allow for cities to maintain or even exceed North American urban densities at a lower floor count.
The Japanese system isn’t perfect and does come with some challenges as well. To allow for the lack of on-street parking, there is a need for a large amount of off-street parking so there are a greater amount of both above and below grade parking garages. There are even quite a few of dreaded surface parking lots on the outskirts of large cities. The system also increases the cost of vehicle ownership so it can become out of reach for certain segments of the population.
In my opinion the benefits outweigh the negatives significantly though. That said, we can’t just flip a switch and move to the Japanese model. There would need to be significant investment in public transit and a complete overhaul of land use policies to acknowledge the lower amount of car ownership as well as the fact that private car spaces would now be a commodity. The benefit to those that did not own a car but had a private parking spot is that they could easily rent it out for additional income.
This is not a policy that Victoria on its own could implement or at least not without significant difficulty. With ICBC maintaining oversight of vehicle registration in the province, it would need to be done at the provincial level. That said it could be done in a way where the larger cities had the policy implemented first and those more rural areas that do not have transit service could be implemented over time. Other jurisdictions have paid attention to what Japan has done. The State of Mizoram now has a proof of parking requirement, and Singapore has a very limited amount of parking spots across the whole of the city-state.
What do you think? Could there be benefits to moving to a Japanese model of parking requirements in Victoria? Let me know in the comments!
