Abstract Manager

Background information

The City of Vancouver’s Transportation Demand Management (TDM) for Developments program was introduced in 2019 as a way for developments to encourage reduced driving and to promote trips by walking, biking, transit, and car share. The City’s program provides an opportunity to accept lower parking provision in exchange for measures such as subsidized transit passes, enhanced bike parking, and transportation marketing services.

Key issues

TDM plans are mandatory for most new developments downtown and for all large sites across the City, while optional elsewhere for developers to receive parking reductions. The current TDM policy has had some challenges, including the large number of TDM choices, time to process applications, and the difficulty in balancing TDM points and minimum parking requirements.

Objectives

The updates to the TDM program aimed to make the TDM program easier to use, to incentivize applicants to choose TDM over vehicle parking, reduce the need for legal agreements, and accelerate the process both for applicants and for review staff.

Methodology

The TDM system was restructured to eliminate the need to calculate point requirements and instead offers a choice of pre-selected packages of TDM measures, called ‘bundles’. The TDM bundles include combinations of the following TDM measures:

• Transit passes
• Public bike share memberships
• Additional bike parking spaces
• Increased proportion of bicycle lockers and oversized bicycle parking spaces
• Car share vehicles and spaces
• Unbundled or otherwise priced parking (i.e. separating the cost of parking from the primary use of the building)

These measures were selected for their ease of application, ability to scale with development site size, and impact on both to the application (space requirements, cost, programmatic versus infrastructure) and to the end user (incentivizing transit, cycling, or car share rather than a private vehicle). In addition, transit proximity parking reductions have been simplified and maximized, monitoring fund contributions eliminated, and requirements for legal agreements reduced.

Conclusions

The TDM program has been expanded in areas that parallel the elimination of minimum parking requirements. Where there are no minimum parking requirements (Downtown, West End, Broadway Plan Area), a TDM Plan is now required for all development permit applications with more than 12 dwelling units (residential) or more than 500 m² of floor area (non-residential). Where parking minimums remain, a TDM Plan continues to be optional in order to achieve a reduction in minimum parking requirements.