The Sarnia Journal has partnered with the nuSarnia Foundation to feature a series of stories promoting active transportation and community wellness.
By: The nuSarnia Foundation
Black Friday is a reminder of a prevalent issue across North America: we have way too much parking!
This overabundance of parking highlights how wasteful and destructive parking requirements are making our landscapes and places less productive.
Parking mandates, which require developers to provide a certain number of parking spaces for each project, play out in many undesirable ways for North America’s towns and cities. Residential parking mandates, for instance, inflate the cost of constructing small-scale housing, while commercial stipulations hinder the growth of numerous small businesses, even those anticipating increased customer traffic sans automobiles.
But nowhere are these policies more egregious, and visually striking, than in parking at large-scale commercial developments, such as shopping centers and big-box stores.
From a municipalities perspective, this land is completely unproductive and may become a liability. Cities have parking mandates because they want to make sure there’s enough parking for a Taylor Swift concert, or for busy shopping days.
Black Friday comes once a year, and Taylor Swift once a lifetime. But parking mandates make our lives worse all year.
If you want a strong, productive city, one of the best, fastest things you can do is remove parking mandates and subsidies.
Tomorrow (November 24th), get outside and take pictures of excess or underused parking around town and share your photos online. Use the hashtag #nuSarnia and #BlackFridayParking.
By participating in this year's #BlackFridayParking campaign on social media, or engaging in the conversation with the hashtag, you contribute to the advocacy for a more sensible and sustainable approach to urban planning!
nuSarnia is a passionate group of social entrepreneurs committed to making Sarnia the best it can be – a vibrant, lively city where people are excited to live, work, play and learn. We are committed to raising awareness, sharing knowledge, acquiring wisdom, fostering collaboration and attentively listing to create a more connected, active and healthy community.
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