The populated part of British Columbia is being hit with a parking tax that I think is being placed on the folks who own the parking spaces. IE, you get charged so much per space of parking you own. I have heard of this before, in the UK, and its used to dissuade companies from providing parking or charging their employees to park to pay for the additional tax. The goal is to reduce car traffic and force people on to rapid transit.
However, in BC the goal appear to be simply to raise money for a rapid transit infrastructure. Read the article here.
Depend on your since of humor you will be either laughing or crying when you get to the part about the transit board that had already used up all its taxing ability (gas taxes, transit fares, and property taxes) except parking and so why not, let get the money any way we can.
This appears to me to be an onerous and completely unfair. Obviously folks that don’t have parking areas but use the area of others don’t pay the additional tax. I can’t help be on the side of the more than 90% of the businesses in the area that are up in arms, almost to the torches and pitchforks stage, in opposing the levy.
They weren’t successful. The board, made up of a bunch of the local Mayors, some of whom were elected on a "no more tax" platform, voted 8-4 to institute the tax but lower the amount from $1.05 to $.85 a square meter. It includes areas used for deliveries, turn arounds, and even trash bins.
Wonderful —
JVH
One Response
Due to silly zoning laws you are still forced to build ‘X’ number of parking stalls. If you could decide to build something else on your unused parking stalls, the tax is fair enough. You could choose to eliminate all parking and let everyone take transit, thus using no parking stalls at all. Let the market decide how much parking is required, and then tax away! Force the land owners to provide ‘x’ number of parking stalls, and then tax them is perhaps, unfair.
It should be noted that TransLink also finances road and highway upgrades in the region. Much new infrastructure is needed to accommodate all the vehicles that the zoning bylaws require we build parking facilities for. Should the circle should be broken?