Two-car families deserve two-car driveways, city planners say
By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN January 22, 2014 7:00 PM
OTTAWA — Owning two cars and having nowhere to put them is such a problem in Ottawa’s outer suburbs that we need to relax the rules limiting the sizes of people’s driveways, the city’s planning department says.
The idea is to create “a new balance between parking and other concerns in the suburban communities outside the Greenbelt,” according to a report bound for city council’s planning committee next week. In general, driveways are only allowed to be as wide as the garages they serve, and on the small lots that are common in newer parts of Stittsville and Barrhaven in particular, that means they can only fit one car.
If the garage is full of old couches and hockey gear, two-car families are left parking one car on the street. Streets full of cars parked that way are a pain for visitors and some residents complain that they’re unsightly or unsafe because they’re too crowded.
The solution: let people widen their driveways beyond the widths of their garages so they can park two cars side by side, on condition that the extra paving is done with interlocking stones, tiles, or other pretty materials, not plain asphalt or concrete. Driveways built that way would be allowed to cover up to half the frontage of a house.
An online survey found that was a happy medium: Sixty per cent of more than 1,000 respondents in the unscientific poll said they’d have no problem if everybody on their block did it, though opinion started to tilt the other way when the planners asked about letting driveways extend across two-thirds of a house instead of just half.
The looser rules would cover all of Ottawa’s suburbs outside the Greenbelt. Though they don’t do much for people living in townhouses on very narrow lots: the 50-per-cent rule applies to them, too, even if that doesn’t let them widen their driveways at all.
Most people would be OK with the look of driveways and parking pads that took up almost the entire front yards of narrow townhouses, the survey found but there are practical problems with letting that happen: where to shovel snow in the winter, where to leave bins on garbage day, all the extra run-off when it rains. So they get the same limit as everyone else, even though it leads to a much firmer restriction.
“To do otherwise would, while fixing a parking problem, cause more serious engineering and operational problems,” the report says.
Shad Qadri, the Stittsville councillor who raised the problem months ago, said he’s satisfied with the proposed solution. “I think it will help alleviate some of the concerns that have been a problem, particularly in newer parts of my community,” he said.
Garages and driveways in some areas are just too small for many families, he said. “Some of the garages are not capable of storing a large car, in my community. A lot of people drive large vehicles, so a lot of single-car garages that are constructed are garages in name, but they may not be able to accommodate a mid-size vehicle,” he said.
People sometimes buy houses without realizing they’ll need more storage space or bigger cars as their families grow, Qadri said. The problem cascades from the house to the garage to the driveway and out into the street; wider driveways will at least keep people’s stuff on their own property.
It’s possible that the city allows developers to build new houses with garages that are too small to be practical, especially for bigger vehicles like minivans and SUVs, the report says, and with driveways that are too short. A city task force that’s looking at how to build better suburbs is to consider changing those rules, too.
But in the meantime, the looser driveway-width restrictions are due for a vote next Tuesday, Jan. 28.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
ottawacitizen.com/greaterottawa
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