There is a struggle playing out in North Oakville. It’s the struggle between what people want and what urban planners think they should want. The main battleground is parking.
“This area was very poorly planned,” complains Nav Nanda, president of the North Oakville Ward 7 Residents Association. “Parking has been a big challenge for everyone.”
It’s a perspective echoed by other residents living north of Dundas Street, and even the two town councillors that represent the ward.
But North Oakville’s parking woes aren’t a result of errors or oversights. They are a deliberate and intentional element of the community’s design and planning standards.
And if urban planners have their way, new developments in Oakville and across Halton will share the same characteristics.
The history
The lands north of Dundas Street were developed with a vision.
With narrow streets, denser development and small neighbourhood storefronts, the philosophy was to create communities where people would walk their kids to school, pick up a coffee at the local shop, then catch transit to work.
The idea stemmed from an idyllic planning vision known as New Urbanism that swept North America in the ‘90s.
Oakville brought one of the leading proponents of the philosophy, architect Andres Duany, to town in 2003 to lead a discussion on developing the lands bounded by Dundas Street and Hwy. 407, Tremaine Road and Ninth Line.
The town’s eventual vision was to develop the 3,100 hectare area into 14 compact, walkable neighborhoods that include a range of housing types and local businesses.
It’s a new style of development that offers undeniable environmental and economic benefits.
Denser housing and narrower streets curb urban sprawl into undeveloped greenfield lands. Putting more people in a smaller area keeps down the town’s costs for the myriad of services residents require. Building more houses per hectare lowers developer expenses and makes homes more affordable.
Central to the vision is the notion that local shopping, pedestrian-friendly design, connected bike routes and available transit will convince residents to move away from the automobile.
So far, that has been a failure.
The results
Communities like north Oakville undeniably make better use of land by increasing population density, says Jill Grant, professor emeritus with Dalhousie University’s school of planning.
Her research into similar developments around North America found they have been successful in “achieving a mix of housing types, high design standards, attractive open space systems, and a walkable environment.”
But most – and particularly those in suburban-type settings like Oakville – have been less successful in establishing viable commercial districts and in meeting their other visions.
Nowhere has that failing been more obvious than around automobile use.
Back in the days of Duany’s visit to Oakville, planners talked about designing a community where families would move in with one car and discover they didn’t need to buy a second one because of the great neighbourhood services and well-established and convenient nearby transit.
But of course, it wasn’t those planners who moved into the neighbourhoods. And they don’t appear to be talking to the people who have.
Nanda offers both a surprised and somewhat defensive response when asked about the community philosophy of reducing automobile dependency.
“Who said that was part of the plan?” she asks in a bewildered tone. “I don’t know why they would even feel that it would be less (car) reliant – you have young families here.”
She didn’t move into the neighbourhood with any plan of eliminating vehicles and can’t understand why people in North Oakville would be likely to drive less than those living anywhere else in the town.
“This is an area where you wouldn’t be expecting to walk anywhere,” she says. “If you need to go south of Dundas, you’re going to drive.”
It’s a disconnect that Grant’s research has discovered in numerous communities.
While many of these neighbourhoods were designed with great intentions to minimize the need for cars, Grant says people simply haven’t taken them out of their lives.
“Over time, the parking problems have grown in many of these communities,” she says. “And filling up the narrow streets with lots of on-street parking undermines quality of the urban spaces that the communities were built to represent. It’s become a real issue.”
Statistics bear out stories
Nanda and her neighbours share anecdotal complaints. Not enough parking at the school, in front of stores, on the streets for visitors. Large cars spilling out of small driveways to hang over sidewalks. Unavailable street parking despite paying $50 for a monthly overnight permit. Narrow roadways clogged with parked vehicles.
Statistics confirm their story. Household vehicle ownership in Oakville has risen from an average of 1.76 in 2006 to 1.9 in 2016, according to the latest Transportation Tomorrow Survey.
That study found only four per cent of Oakville households don’t own a car, while 48 per cent own two cars, and 18 per cent own three or more.
The total number of vehicles in town is also rising, thanks to population growth.
The statistics appear in a staff report delivered to town councillors in August 2019, in response to a council request for a study of North Oakville parking issues.
Staff dismay with the notion of making it easier to accommodate automobiles bleeds through that report.
Delivered by the town’s planning director Mark Simeoni, the report emphasizes the “new urbanist principles” of North Oakville development, noting, “When complete, these new neighbourhoods are planned to be transit-supportive and provide viable transportation options.”
Telling councillors that we are living in "a time of transition," Simeoni added “we’re not looking at permanent solutions that will deviate much from what we’re trying to achieve...”
Town staff also add that the parking studies will feed into a larger Parking Management Plan that will “consider how parking can be provided on a full cost-recovery basis and how parking can be managed in a way to free up existing public on-street parking by encouraging residents which have the ability to park offstreet (e.g. in a private garage) to use those facilities first or reconsider the need for multiple car ownership where transit, or other alternative forms of transportation are viable.”
The obvious underlying message: don't expect the new plan to make parking cheaper or easier.
While originally promised for completion by spring 2020, the parking study has not yet gotten off the ground.
Town staff are now preparing to send out a Request for Proposals for a study consultant, according to Jill MacInnes, a senior communications advisor with the town.
Living with the problems
Ward 7 councillors Pavan Parmar and Jasvinder Sandhu have heard the complaints – and indeed, live the story.
A lack of visitor parking tops Parmar’s list. Nearby private roads offer no on street parking for visitors. Those cars are dispersed onto nearby public roads, competing for scarce parking with homeowners and on those streets, as well as their visitors.
“There’s just not enough visitor parking,” she says. “The way it was planned, we might have thought okay, this will work but now that it’s actually been built, it’s not working.”
Both councillors agree that the current North Oakville parking requirements – which generally range between one and two spaces per residential unit – are too low.
“We know this is supposed to be a transit first community and that’s how Ward 7 was created but people really haven’t bought into that yet,” says Sandhu. “That’s where we are and why we require additional parking, at least right now.”
Their hope is that the parking study will result in changes to the zoning bylaw parking standards – standards that they and their colleagues are questioning with each new development that comes before them for approval.
“We’re in a brand-new community so there’s a lot of young families that don’t have children that drive,” adds Sandhu. “We are foreseeing a potential for this to be exacerbated over the next 10 years.”
Expect more in the future
While the new urbanism label – and some of its warmer, fuzzier ideas – have largely vanished, the concept of denser, mixed-use development now dominates the thinking of area urban planners.
In a recent meeting to update Halton’s Official Plan, regional planners emphasized the intent to create policies that encourage higher density development like apartment buildings and townhouses, built in compact areas, with an aim of reducing use of personal vehicles.