New design standards help reduce the negative impacts of parking lots

The City of Torontos 2007 draft Design Guidelines for Greening Surface Parking Lots provide specific strategies and measures which developers, designers and reviewers of parking lots can apply to help meet specific environmental performance targets. Targets in this document are those of the Toronto Green Development Standard. The Guidelines were written to deal with common urban design and environmental challenges found within and around surface parking lots, and address:

• Location; vehicle and pedestrian layout and access
• Snow and stormwater management
• Soil quality and landscaping
• Pedestrian and cycling infrastructure
• Trees and reducing the urban heat island effect
• Lighting
• Sustainable materials and technologies

Specific requirements that address air quality, energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions, water quality and efficiency, solid waste reduction, and urban ecology are notated with a colorful icon. Numerous photographs, site plans, elevations, metrics and a detailed planting guide are included. While no calculations for parking maximums (capping the total number of parking spaces allowed for particular adjacent land uses) are included, the opportunity for solar power generation and rainwater harvesting in parking lots is noted.

Read more and download the 40-page document at: the City of Torontos urban planning page.

For briefer, conceptual work on parking lots, see plans for a prototype downtown Minneapolis low-impact parking lot, developed in 2004 by the Metropolitan Design Center at the University of Minnesota.