As return-to-office changes ramp up this fall, many federal public servants will be commuting into a downtown core with thousands fewer parking spots than it had a decade ago.<\/p>\n
The City of Ottawa doesn’t keep an annual inventory of parking spots, but two “comprehensive” collection efforts \u2014 one in 2016 and another 2025 \u2014 paint a clear picture of dwindling parking supply in the city’s core.<\/p>\n
In 2016, downtown Ottawa had 17,137 total available off-street parking spots, split almost evenly between public parking and private lots reserved for employees or customers. By 2025, the area had just 13,913 off-street spaces, again split roughly down the middle between public and private lots.<\/p>\n
The decrease of 3,224 spots, or nearly 20 per cent, applies to surface parking lots, structures and garages within an area bounded by the Rideau Canal to the east, Gloucester Street to the south, Bronson Avenue to the west and Wellington Street to the north.<\/p>\n
With most federal public servants back in office four days a week as of early July, the City of Ottawa is anticipating an influx of weekday traffic<\/a> into the core \u2014 and many public servants who work in the dense cluster of downtown office buildings are bracing for hotter competition for a place to park.<\/p>\n As the city cuts back on parking, advocates say the federal government’s return-to-office policy highlights a growing need to invest in public transit serving the city’s core.<\/p>\n Less parking, more possibilities<\/p>\n Derrick Simpson, transit chair with the Centretown Community Association, said fewer parking spots downtown “isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”<\/p>\n Surface level lots, for instance, are often redeveloped into housing, which is both a necessary step amid a housing crisis and an opportunity to generate far more property tax for city coffers, he said.<\/p>\n “It’s just simply more valuable to provide housing than it is to have surface level parking lots,” he said. “We can have buildings; we can have houses; we can have restaurants; we can have parks.”<\/p>\n In fact, he said, city policies in recent years have explicitly incentivized the redevelopment of parking lots.<\/p>\n Last year, for example, Ottawa city councillors discontinued a preferential tax rate for surface parking lots, meaning they are now taxed at the full commercial rate.<\/p>\n The City of Ottawa’s Official Plan<\/a>, which acts as a master blueprint for city planning, seeks to gradually cut down on the amount of city land devoted to surface parking. To do so, it grants city staff the ability to reduce or eliminate minimum parking requirements and introduce maximum parking limits, among other powers.<\/p>\n In an emailed statement, the city’s manager of parking services Scott Caldwell said “several factors” can affect the availability of parking, but redevelopment is chief among them.<\/p>\n “Over time, parcels of land that contained surface lots or parking garages have been redeveloped for other uses, resulting in fewer available parking spaces,” Caldwell wrote, adding the supply can fluctuate if lots are reconfigured.<\/p>\n From 2016 to 2025, nine surface lots within the downtown area surveyed by the city “are no longer identified” in the inventory, accounting for nearly 400 fewer spaces.<\/p>\n But, Caldwell stressed, of the 7,060 publicly available off-street parking spots last year, only 13 per cent were managed by the city.<\/p>\n A recent city report referenced more up-to-date figures.<\/p>\n Excluding surface parking lots, the downtown parking supply has decreased by more than 900 spots since 2019, before most public servants were sent home during the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n The reduction in parking spots, referenced in the city’s fall transportation plan<\/a>, accounted for a drop of about 9 per cent \u2014 though city staff cautioned that number was based on a broader definition of “downtown” than the other figures.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, the reduction shows how demand for parking has “evolved” over time, according to the report, and has become “more variable, driven by a mix of workers, residents and visitors rather than primarily office commuters.”<\/p>\n Several public servants who spoke to the Ottawa Citizen Wednesday said they drive in early to beat the rush, and multiple parking attendants said downtown lots and garages often fill up by 7:30 a.m.<\/p>\n “After 8 a.m., it’s a nightmare,” said one commuter.<\/p>\n Residents ‘feeling the effects’ of return-to-office traffic<\/p>\n For Simpson, any traffic impacts stemming from the federal government’s latest return-to-office mandate are a symptom of a bigger issue: “OC Transpo is failing.”<\/p>\n “We’re trying to get people out of their cars to get to the office, which we kind of need to do because we only have so much space downtown,” he said.<\/p>\n As Simpson sees it, the problem is simple: “The city is not trying very hard.”<\/p>\n In preparation for the anticipated increase in return-to-office traffic this fall, the city tweaked bus schedules<\/a>, added express bus routes and committed to running the O-Train earlier and more often.<\/p>\n One element of the plan attempted to address the parking crunch by allowing places of worship<\/a> located in the downtown core or near select rapid-transit stations to reserve parking spots for commuters.<\/p>\n Simpson said the efforts amount to tinkering “around the edges.”<\/p>\n He’d rather see deeper investments in priority bus lanes, bike share and traffic calming.<\/p>\n “We’re feeling the effects of this traffic,” he said. “Let’s make (transit) better all across the city, but especially downtown.”<\/p>\n