Local Neighbourhoods Need More Shops and Less Parking

The Convenience of Proximity

Families in the suburbs of Ottawa have been sold a specific kind of convenience for the last several generations. It’s a picture that promises that as long as you have a car in your garage and a parking lot at your destination, the world is your oyster. But anyone who has ever had to pick up a dozen eggs or a stick of butter in the average Orléans subdivision knows the reality: despite having a car, there is no such thing as a quick errand.

When we designed our suburban neighborhoods, travel by car in and out of the community was typically the first and often one of the only priorities of planners. The proximity of people to the things they need and want came second to where we will store cars and allow them to travel quickly through our communities. We have built a system where the ‘last mile’ isn’t just an urban planning buzzword—it’s a physical barrier to active transportation that turns most every basic human need into a car trip. To make our suburbs truly flourish, we need to stop asking where the cars will park, and start asking how far we expect people to travel to anything.

The Hidden Tax on Your Clock: A Comparison of Travel Times

To understand why proximity beats parking, we have to look at how we actually spend our time during a trip. Let’s take an arbitrary one-kilometre trip to a local business—a distance that should be the bread and butter of a healthy neighborhood.

The Car Trip: On paper, driving a kilometer at 40 km/h takes about 90 seconds. But that’s not the whole story. You have to walk to the garage, back out of the driveway, navigate at least a handful of stop signs or traffic lights, and then find a spot in the parking lot and walk up to your destination. Depending on the size of the parking lot and how busy it is, once you park, you may have to walk anywhere from a few meters to even 50-100 metres through the lot just to reach the front door. By the time you’ve actually entered the store, 8 to 10 minutes have likely passed.

The Bike Trip: A person cycling at a relaxed pace covers a kilometer in about 3 to 4 minutes. Because a bike can often be parked directly in front of the destination (or even brought right to the door in a neighborhood-scale setting where bike racks aren’t present), there next to friction to park. The trip is door-to-door.

The Walking Trip: A brisk walk covers a kilometer in about 12 minutes. In a neighborhood where the shop is integrated into the residential fabric—perhaps just two or three blocks away—that walk drops to under five minutes.

The irony of the suburban “driving first” model is that by requiring businesses to be surrounded by massive lots, we push those businesses even further away from the houses they serve. This increases the distance, which nudges more people to drive, which requires even larger parking lots. It is a self-defeating cycle that kills the very convenience it claims to provide.

In a separate article, I am going to be taking a look at a trip to the nearest coffee shop to my community, as a sort of case study of how zoning and parking requirements make residential small businesses challenging or even illegal to run. You can read that now right here: Getting to the Coffee Shop: A Case Study in Suburban Villages.

One of the least plausible arguments I hear against small businesses in neighbourhoods is that there’s no room for parking lots and local streets will just be covered in cars all the time. But I don’t buy that because such businesses can and should actively cater to the residents that actually live within a short walk or bike, because those the most likely shoppers to become regulars, and probably your most loyal customers. I’ll discuss this further in the case study linked above.

The Asphalt Tax on Small Business

The requirement for private parking lots hasn’t been just a minor inconvenience to small, local entrepreneurs; it can be a massive financial burden on them. In many parts of Ottawa, a new small business has been, until new zoning by-laws are passed this year, required to provide a specific number of parking spaces based on its square footage. If you want to open a tiny, 800-square-foot cafe, but the zoning requires a dozen parking spaces, you suddenly need more land for cars than you do for customers.

This scales all the way up to massive stores like Costco, where despite the building having a massive footprint, the parking lots at Costco are often larger than the stores. These so called ‘parking minimums’ are gradually being removed from cities across North America through new laws, but it will take a long time for this change to ripple through the suburbs and have a meaningful effect.

For a local resident looking to start a business, especially one that aims to serve mostly residents within walking distance, this sort of regulation makes the barrier to entry almost insurmountable. It forces shops out of the neighborhood and into commercial areas, strip-malls, or big-box plazas where the land is already paved. This drains the life out of our residential streets and ensures that the only way to get a coffee is to get behind a wheel.

Proximity as a Social and Economic Asset

When a business is close enough to walk to, it stops being just a point of transaction and starts being a social anchor. You see your neighbors. Your kids gain the autonomy to walk to the store for a treat without needing a chauffeur. This independent mobility for children and seniors is one of the first things lost when we prioritize parking over proximity.

From a municipal perspective, the math is equally compelling. A small corner store or a handful of local shops produces far more tax revenue per acre than a box store with a sprawling parking lot. Land set aside for parking doesn’t cost the same property taxes as actual buildings do. By allowing businesses to skip the parking lot, they can sit closer to the street and closer to each other. This provides a more productive tax base that can actually fund the amenities we want, like better transit, more city services, and a more robust civil life.

Incentivizing the Neighborhood Shop

The ways to address this here aren’t complicated, but it does require a shift in how we think about zoning. For decades, we have treated “commercial” and “residential” as two incompatible development styles that must be kept completely separate. We need to make the neighborhood shop way easier to build, and even give incentives for it.

This means allowing low-impact commercial uses by law—cafes, small groceries, professional offices—within the residential fabric. It means working to shrink parking lots and make better use of that space for homes and other small businesses. Small-scale local businesses should be able to rely on customers who are already there as patrons, those who live within a five-minute walk or bike ride.

We don’t need more massive plazas on the outskirts of our communities. We need more life in the heart of them. If we want neighborhoods that are truly convenient, we have to stop building for the car and start building for the person. It’s time to choose proximity over parking.