Where Did Ward 11's Parking Go?

The Headline Number: Roughly 385 Permanent Spaces

The clearest quantified Ward 11 projects add up to about 371 installed or confirmed permanent

parking spaces removed. If the approved 14-space loss associated with the Ossington streetscape is included, the total rises to roughly 385. Temporary construction closures are not included in that permanent total.

How Have Bike Lanes Impacted Available Parking?

Bike lanes and complete-street projects are an important part of the story. Using a 2021-to-present convention, about 131 net spaces in Ward 11 are tied to cycling or complete-street projects. The largest individual examples are Yonge Street at 58 net spaces and College Street at 39.But the biggest recent source of documented parking loss is Bathurst RapidTO. The project accounts for at least 236 paid spaces, plus other curb parking, and no one-for-one replacement has been identified in the project material. That means transit priority, rather than cycling, is now the single largest quantified source of recent parking removal in the ward.

How Does Ward 11 Compare to our Neighbours?

The most important comparison is not simply whether Ward 11 has “more” parking loss than another ward. The more revealing pattern is that several major types of street projects have overlapped in Ward 11 over a relatively short period: transit priority, cycling infrastructure, complete streets, reconstruction, streetscape work and construction staging without any clear replacements being verified.

What makes Ward 11 distinctive is not simply that parking has been removed, but the scale and concentration of those losses without a consistent plan to replace them. Over the past five years, major projects on Bathurst, Yonge, College, Avenue Road, Davenport, Bloor and Ossington have removed or are expected to remove hundreds of public parking spaces. Some individual projects have retained, relocated or replaced a portion of the affected parking, but there has been no ward-wide strategy to account for the cumulative loss. As one project follows another, the available supply continues to shrink while replacement and mitigation measures have not kept pace.

That is the larger issue facing Ward 11. Streets will continue to evolve to accommodate transit, cycling, pedestrian safety and other public priorities, but removing public parking should not mean simply accepting its permanent disappearance. When the City removes a significant number of spaces, residents and businesses deserve to know where that parking will be replaced, what alternatives will be provided, and how the latest project adds to losses that have already occurred nearby. After roughly 385 spaces removed or approved for removal in five years, Ward 11 needs a more deliberate approach: measure parking losses cumulatively, identify replacement or mitigation before additional spaces disappear, and treat the preservation of reasonable local parking access as part of transportation planning rather than an afterthought.

-The 11