Recycling is REALLY Difficult, or, the Curious Case of the Coffee K-Cup

Years and years ago, when I was in university, I lived in a shared house with a bunch of other guys. One day I came home from school and I noticed that our recycling "blue box" was on the curb, un-emptied. On top of the newspapers, yogurt containers, and so on, one of my housemates had dumped a bunch of rotten apples, which (of course) meant that the recycling pickup dude had passed it by. I removed the apples and brought the blue bin back into the house. I then asked the person responsible (who's nickname was "Bizarre"---you can imagine why) about the apples that had ended up on the blue bin. His answer was that "the apples should be recyclable".

Well, yeah. Of course they should have. They are now. But what Mr. Bizarre had missed is that recycling isn't just an individual choice, it's a complex social activity that requires a huge logistical network that integrates just about every aspect of our home, government, and, economy into a well-integrated web. In the process of attempting to get all these elements together, an enormous number of people are asked to significantly change their behaviour in ways that have a profound impact on their personal lives, how they do business, and, how they view the role of government. And this ain't an easy thing to do!

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I'm an environment hawk. I've never owned a car, I insulated the heck out of my house, I refuse to fly in an airplane unless absolutely necessary, etc---and even I get tripped up about what should and should not get recycled. The reason why is because what does and doesn't depends on the type of technology each municipality employs plus whether or not it makes economic sense for the city to recycle it.  It is impossible to predict whether something is supposed to be recycled or not unless you have a pretty good understanding of the local recycling infrastructure. To illustrate some of the complexities involved, consider the Keurig coffee system.

In case you've just returned from Mars,
this is a Keurig coffee machine.
image c/o Wiki Commons

I use the word "system" advisedly, because when you buy one of the coffee makers, you are making a personal commitment to purchasing the specific disposable, one-use pods that go into the machines too.

The thing on the left is a coffee cup, the item on the right isn't
a creamer, it's a coffee pod---which is the villain in this drama.
image c/o Wiki Commons

This creates a huge problem for municipalities because the pods are an order of magnitude increase in complexity for recycling as compared to loose coffee grounds. The problem is that the Keurig pod is a composite created from several different feed stocks---all of which have to go through a different process in order to be recycled.

Coffee grounds from a traditional coffee maker---
you just put them straight into the compost. 
Image from "My Earth Garden" used under "fair use" rule.

The K-Cup, on the other hand, consists of a plastic shell,
inner liner basket, and, coffee---all of which need to be
separated and sorted into different recycling streams.
(Image used under "fair use" rule, from Smithsonian Magazine,
Originally from Green Mountain Coffee.) 

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Krups Espresso machine.
Just as easy.
Image c/o Amazon
under fair use rule. 

Reusable k-cups.
What's the point? "Brew-Oro" 
re-use k-cups. Image
c/o Amazon under
fair use rule.

It is true that there are reusable "k-cups" that you can purchase for a Keurig machine, but the whole point of buying one is the "convenience" of the disposable pods. If you decide to buy a reusable pod, you would be much further ahead to purchase something like an espresso maker.  I have a simple "Krups" machine and all I have to do to load it is pour in water, spoon some coffee in the metal "pod", and run it. The cup that holds the coffee cleans by tapping it with a spoon, which knocks out a neat little "puck" into the compost bucket. No fuss, no muss, and just as convenient. My Krups cost---if anything---a little less than a Keurig to buy, and certainly the coffee is a lot cheaper than if I bought it in disposable k-cups. (If you don't like espresso, toss a shot or two in a mug and fill it the rest of the way up with boiling water, and you have an "Americano".)

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The question that the naive citizen is confronted with when they contemplate a disposable K-cup is "what to do with it?"

The first option is to recycle it. Unfortunately, as I pointed out above, it is a manufactured composite that consists of several different parts, all of which have to be separated out and sent into different streams.

It turns out that this is "a thing". Here's a YouTube video of a woman who took on the job of recycling the Keurig cups from her workplace.

And here's a handy, dandy, tool that you can buy (of course) and use to recycle those dastardly k-cups.

Once you've actually separated the k-cup into the three (or four) components of: plastic shell, foil top, coffee filter, and, coffee---then the citizen can separate them out for recycling. Looking at the Guelph wet dry guide to sorting your trash, it would appear that the coffee and filter paper can go into the composting stream, however, the foil lid needs to go in the garbage. And also, if you don't wash the cup assembly, it should go into the garbage too.

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But wait! There's an added complexity. K-cups are small, which is a problem because it is difficult to separate them out of other parts of the recycling stream. In the words of the past Executive Director of the Municipal Waste Association (and all-around good guy) Ben Bennett,

Although the various components that make up a coffee pod, if separated, may be recyclable, recycling and sorting equipment is not designed to handle such small pieces. Even if new equipment were introduced, any separated material would be of such low value it would not justify the cost.

"The Coffee Pod Dilemma", Ben Bennett, April 2017, Municipal World, p-12 

Of course, all this complexity is not really an issue to the companies making the k-cups. They know that their customers will gladly disassemble all their products, sort them into different streams, and, municipalities will gladly set aside a fraction of people's taxes to pay for the complex sorting machines that are needed to carefully sort out these tiny pieces of plastic. In fact, they have provided a YouTube video that explains how how simple the process really is, and have given a firm timeline for when all municipalities in Canada will have their machinery in place to do the job! (I especially like the sorting machines that they have designed that sort all the different plastic types into their respective streams. Isn't technology wonderful?)

I hate to rain on the Keurig parade, but the animated plastic sorting system that you see in the above video is not quite exactly how stuff is sorted at the Wet/Dry facility in Guelph. (Fast forward to slightly after the one minute mark, if you are in a rush.)

As you can see, there are no groovy magical machines that sort a bunch of garbage into different streams---paper, plastic, glass, etc---instead there are just a bunch of poorly paid people trying to keep up to a fast conveyor belt. Moreover, the same process is used to separate plastic items into different streams. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, look at the bottom of a plastic item and you'll see one of these logos.) If you mix up the different types, you contaminate the feed stock and this dramatically lowers the value of the reclaimed material.

Yup, that's right. There are seven different categories of plastic
that need to separated from one another. And, it's done by hand.
Now toss in tiny Keurig cups and see how efficient the process gets.
Image used by "fair use", from "Eartheasy". 

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We interrupt this detailed and depressing deconstruction of recycling as a complex social phenomenon to insert a venal plea for money! Yes, being a journalist is work. And in order to ensure that people actually create information that allows citizens to make informed decisions during elections, there needs to be some positive feedback mechanism for people to reward the "creatives" who do the research and writing. Luckily, we now have "Patreon", which allows people to make small payment subscriptions to bloggers who are trying to fill the void left by the decline of mainstream newspapers. (Thanks Susan for your monthly pledge---you are awesome!) You can also leave a one-time donation. Both options appear on the right hand side of the page. If you can't afford to pay even as little as $1/month, that's OK. You can also help by sharing the the "Back-Grounder" link on social media with your friends. Now back to our main event!

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I hope that I haven't lost anyone with my exhaustively detailed exposition about why it is ridiculous to suggest that people will be recycling their Keurig pods. Even the industry can understand the problem, so there has been another initiative, one that suggests that there is a composting k-cup, one that you just toss in the green bin and which then breaks down into plant food. That sounds ideal. Instead of separating the plastic bits into separate streams for recycling. All you have to do is toss the used pods into your green bin.

Three years ago there was a public relations flurry in Guelph about the "composting" coffee pod that had been developed at the University of Guelph.

The problem is, however, that just because something can be composted under ideal conditions in a system designed for this sort of item doesn't mean that the specific system that any given municipality uses to compost municipal waste will be able to do so.

The thing to realize is the importance of velocity to composting. That is to say, some things break down faster than others. To illustrate the point, consider the difference between raw steak and beef jerky. You would never leave a steak in a jar in your pantry for even a week because it would start to rot. But you can leave jerky there for months if not years. It's the same thing with stuff you toss in your green bin. Your banana peels and apple cores are like raw steak---they break down fast. A "compostable" k-cup is more like the jerky. As you can see from this YouTube video, the Guelph composting system is quite complex and is designed to do it's job in only around 60 days. (Again, if you are in a rush, skip the first minute or so. It also refers to plastic bags instead of bins, but the process is still the same as it was back before the transition to the new bins.)

Contrast this with the definition of "compostable" that is used by the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI). According to the good people at the Municipal Waste Association, to be certified by the BPI a product has to be degraded after 180 days, not the 60 that most municipal waste streams usually use. This places the coffee pods securely in the "jerky" category, not the "raw steak" one. And indeed, it is the case that municipalities have found that the "theoretically compostable" k-cups actually don't break down in composting systems like the one Guelph uses. This is tremendously important, because if something takes three times as long to process, the city would have to have three times the current processing facilities to "cook" the compost long enough to ensure that everything breaks down.

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Even worse, composting facilities have to take into account what was explained to me years ago as "the pajama syndrome". That is 10% of citizens will drive across the city at midnight in their pajamas to recycle their waste. Another 10% will only recycle if there is a revolver pressed against their temple and a finger is slowly tightening on the trigger. The other 80% are somewhere in between and will mostly only pay the absolute minimum of attention to the recycling process. This is why recycling programs have to be very, very simple and clear if the city doesn't want people to screw things up by tossing the wrong stuff in the streams. And putting out different brands of k-cups, advertising them as being "recyclable" (when they really aren't), or, "compostable" (when they really aren't)---both of which look almost exactly the same---is just asking for trouble. This is because the plastic cups will get into the compost and screw up the compost quality, and, the composting cups will get into the plastic stream and screw up the plastic feed stock quality.

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The problem is that when private sector researchers are working on a new product whether or not the product can be recycled or composted using the existing municipal systems is just not one of the design criteria. And when the product moves from the lab to the point where the public relations and advertising people start touting it to the general public, there is zero incentive for the company to point out this fine detail. It really doesn't matter at all to the company if the product actually does cut down on waste---the real utility of being "recyclable" or "composting" resides in the ability of this label to convince the public that it is doing something good so they will buy that product instead of one from their competitors. This is the phenomenon known as "Greenwashing".  This isn't some sort of awful conspiracy or proof the evil nature of the people involved. It's just an aspect of the "invisible hand" of the marketplace.

And I use the phrase "invisible hand" advisedly. If you asked everyone involved in the process of trying to confuse people about whether it is a good idea to promote disposable coffee pods, you would probably find some sort of compelling narrative about why what they are doing is a "good thing". The researchers in the laboratory are trying to come up with innovative processes that might eventually be useful---even if they are exaggerating now. Certainly, the money that comes from the private company helps fund the education of grad students. The people writing the press releases are probably trying to keep a good job that they need to pay the mortgage and student loans. And the guy who runs the company that sells the coffee pods is probably trying desperately to keep his company afloat in a tremendously cut-throat market. (A lot of business people really feel a sense of obligation towards their employees and investors, and if they don't keep the profits rolling in they know that they will have to lay people off and lose people's life savings.)

So each person involved in this change has a tremendous personal pressure to "accentuate the positive, and negate the negative", which means that the actual truth of the matter---that there is nothing even remotely "environmentally-friendly" about these coffee pods---just never really gets said. None of these people have decided to be like Shakespeare's Richard the Third and "make good their evil and evil their good". They just realized which side of the bread was buttered and followed the line of least resistance. This isn't surprising---that's how one gets and keeps these sorts of jobs. That's not a conspiracy, or even real malfeasance, it's just how our economy works. The problem is that competition (the "invisible hand") forces people---even if they have the best of intentions---to do things that are against the public interest. So it's important to understand that Capitalism, the "free market", or whatever you call it, has a direct interest in subverting recycling programs, and it will do it every chance it can. 

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This really shouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone. After all, whenever any new technology has come onto the scene there has been a "time lag" between the invention exploding onto the society and government realizing that there needs to be some sort of regulation to keep the "invisible hand" from strangling the citizenry. We have a huge web of government regulations and agencies that keep businesses from poisoning, electrocuting, blowing up, etc, ordinary Canadians. These social constructs are at constant war with the free market as business people try to convince governments that these regulations are just "mindless red tape" that get in the way of them making "an honest buck". Eventually, the federal and provincial governments, plus international treaties will reign in the power of corporations to create huge mountains of trash. (I have no doubt that this is coming. For example, Brussels has recently "declared war on plastic waste".) But before they do, municipal governments will be stuck cleaning up the mess left behind by the "miracle of the free market". 

Without regulation to control the creation of garbage, this is our future.
So, we will have regulation---eventually.
Photo from Phys/Org under fair use rule. 

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My take away from all the research I've done for this article is that the people who manage the municipal recycling programs are placed in an almost impossible situation. They don't control the laws governing packaging---those come under the jurisdiction of the federal and provincial governments. They don't even control the laws that govern advertising, so they can't stop marketing campaigns that confuse the citizenry about what does or doesn't go into the blue or green bins. They just get stuck with a bewildering array of products and materials---both new and old---that they have to figure out how to keep out of the landfill. Managing a municipal recycling system is insanely difficult and it would be a miracle of miracles if a city were able to consistently do so with both a high rate of recovery and keeping within a modest budget. So remember this fact when you hear people complaining bitterly about the Guelph wet/dry. 

I have plans for future articles on this subject. My next one will hopefully be about how the spot market for recycled materials and a recent decision in China has impacts on the Guelph wet/dry.

Making Sense of Guelph's Finances

I decided to roll up my sleeves and write an article about the Guelph city budget so I could help make the financial situation facing residents more understandable. I was more than a little afraid to do so, and the more I got into the job the more I found that that fear was justified. To give the city it's due, staff have made huge progress towards making financial information about the city more available than it has been in the past. If you look at the city website, for example, you can find a very detailed document that explains the 2016 budget. I downloaded it onto my computer and now have a 341 page pdf to work through.  But unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that Guelph has a budget that is approaching a half billion dollars a year, and it really does require a professional's eye to make sense of it---so there is ultimately no way that I can easily understand and explain all the details. This doesn't mean that a thoughtful generalist (or engaged voter) can't learn from the document, however. So I decided the best thing I could do to help readers is to identify some issues that people sometimes get wrong and which can create confusion. They are as follows:

• using brute numbers instead of percentages
• scaling problems that arise because of Guelph's rapid growth
• confusion between capital and operating budgets
• Guelph's extra "design features" that render comparisons with other cities problematic
• emerging long-term problems that most people don't know about
• "locked in" costs that the city is responsible for paying but has little control over

In addition, I think it is important for people to understand that the corporation of the city of Guelph has "hands off" control over and responsibility for various corporations that are either essential to the operation of the city or are the result of specific decisions in the past that fit into the long term "design features" that the city has decided to follow. These include:

• Envida
• Guelph Hydro
• Guelph Municipal Holdings Inc.
• Guelph Junction Railway

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The Simplified Explanation of the Guelph 2016 Budget---in all it's glory.
From the city website

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Why it is Important to Use Percentages:

The first thing necessary to understand about the city budget is its absolute size. This is important because people routinely throw around numbers without attempting to put them into a context. For example, it really doesn't help anyone understand local government if they are told "The total budget used by city Council and the Mayor---including both salaries and expenses---comes to $947,400! Why does it cost so much?" The issue here is that "947,400" is just a number on a page until someone puts it into a context. In many instances people automatically think about what that number would mean in their personal life. In those terms, $947,400 is about several times the cost of a person's home. But that isn't a proper comparison for things as completely different as a city and a household budget. A city is much bigger than any one individual, and does a whole lot more. A more useful way of understanding a number in the budget is to consider it as a percentage of the whole. It turns out that Guelph only spent 0.2% of the entire budget on Council.

The difference between comparing what Council costs to your personal finances to the over-all cost of running a city is emotional. When someone just uses a number instead of a percentage, they are often doing so in order to create an emotional response in the reader. Emotions bypass our reason and can often get us to do things that we wouldn't if we calmly thought about what is really the best thing to do. A professional reporter is often trying to "stir the pot" and get people angry so they will share their story in social media, which will generate "clicks" and therefore revenue for their website. Someone working on a political agenda will also do this because they want to get people angry so they will either avoid voting in the next election (because "they" are "all the same") or because they want citizens to vote for their candidate---or best of all---cut a cheque for the cause.

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People might wonder why I routinely point out how other news sites manipulate people into sharing stories so they can generate ad revenue through clicks on advertising---then ask readers of the "Guelph Back-Grounder" to share it on social media. The difference all comes down to how it's done. Revenue has to come from somewhere to support independent journalism, and you can either support it through making a conscious decision or by being manipulated by people appealing to your unconscious reflexes. What sort of business model do you want to see succeed? 

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How About Another Graph from the City Website?

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Scaling Issues Due to Growth:

It isn't hard to accept when you think about it, but most people don't know that Guelph is the fastest growing city in Ontario, and the 7th fastest growing one in all of Canada. In fact, between 2011 and 2016 Guelph's population grew by 7.7%. (Please note, the population numbers are calculated every five years through the national census. This is not an annual growth rate.) This isn't the fastest than the city has grown in it's lifetime (46% between 1951 and 1961, 51% between 1961 and 1971---and 270% between 1851 and 1871), but it is still quite high in comparison to other Canadian cities. 

Professional staff at City Hall have to take these issues into account when they do capital estimates---for both new builds and routine maintenance. For example, consider the expansion of the city police department building, a $34.1 million dollar project. It was originally built in 1960 when the city's population was 38,000. An addition was put on in 1989. The population in 1991 was 88,000---so we can assume that a doubling had occurred by then. (That would put the average annual increase in population between 1960 and 1989 at 2.42%.) The news release that came with the announcement for the Police Hall expansion suggested that this new build was to provide for the next 25 years. At 7.7% growth rates per every five years, this would suggest that in 25 years Guelph will have a total population of 191,000---a 45% increase. If Guelph didn't have to consider a 45% increase in population over the lifespan of this building project, it wouldn't be hard to believe that the police headquarters project would cost a lot less than $34 million.

Of course no one can tell what tomorrow will bring. Guelph gets its water from wells, which means that if we don't want to build an expensive pipeline to bring in water from Lake Erie, there is a limit to population growth. But it is fair to say that planners can consider a significant increase in population in the near future. This means that when it repairs, expands, or, builds new, the city has to create something with capacity that far exceeds its existing needs. This is a problem because the tax payers that are needed to pay for this expanded infrastructure are currently nothing more than a gleam in the eye of a planner. Hopefully they will arrive shortly and help pay for the expanded infrastructure, but in the interim the existing citizens are going to have to pay for a lot of the stuff that those future people will use. (And, of course, the faster that tax base grows, the greater the chance that the city estimates were too low and the facility will have to be expanded again to deal with a dramatic increase in population.)

And this isn't just a question of "big builds" like a new police station. Consider sewers. There has been a lot of work recently on expanding the sewers downtown so they can handle the increased flow from the new condo towers. Because sewers work with gravity, when you expand them you can't just open a trench and put a bigger pipe in. Instead, you have to dig down farther than the existing pipe and put the new, bigger capacity sewer in deeper. And, Guelph has it's bedrock very close to the surface---which means that putting in bigger sewers requires a lot of "jack hammer parties". (A friend who lives on Margaret Street has told me about the joys of having a year's worth of sewer reconstruction outside one's front door.)

All of this just goes to reinforce the point that it is very, very expensive to have a city grow quickly. 

So why doesn't the city just refuse to grow? First of all, it can't. The Ontario Places to Grow legislation basically forces the city to grow whether we like it or not. Secondly, there are groups in the city that really, really, really want this growth to continue. One person in 13 works in construction and 7% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) comes from the industry. This means that there are extremely well-motivated organizations that work to ensure that government makes no effort at all to limit growth in the city. It also means that anyone who works in construction, sells stuff needed in construction, or, has any family or business connection with either of these two types of people, is going to be extremely upset with any politician who suggests that the city should limit its growth in order to control taxes.

In fact, during the 1991 election campaign a slate of candidates (full disclosure, including me), ran on a "slow down growth" platform that pointed out that the rapid growth of Guelph's suburbs were responsible for increasing tax rates for people who lived in older areas. (This is a separate, but related issue that stems from the cost of servicing new low density (ie:  suburban sprawl) versus older, high density (ie: walkable) neighbourhoods.) This campaign so scared the Guelph Home Builder's Association that they placed a full page advert in the Guelph Mercury that warned

There are candidates in this municipal election that are against growth and economic prosperity. Send a message with your vote that you want Guelph's businesses to grow, for the employment of your children and the prosperity of your neighbours.

From Daily Mercury, Saturday, November 9th, 1991. Page 11-B 

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Since deconstructing the city budget is a huge undertaking, I've decided to split this story into "bite sized bits" instead of creating an on-line "War and Peace".  Stay tuned for the next part, which will come out as soon as I can find the time to write it.

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Here's another graphic from the budget. The city really
has done a good job on the 2016 report!

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If you like reading "the Guelph  Back-Grounder" consider sharing it, making a donation, or, maybe even subscribing to the account.  Even one dollar a month can make a difference!  If people won't support independent, local journalism, the citizenry will not have access to the information that they need to make informed choices. 

The High Cost of Free Parking in Guelph

Executive Summary:

One of the forces that is most influential in creating low-density, carbon-intensive, and, extremely expensive cities to live in are parking regulations. Unfortunately, their pernicious influences are pretty much invisible to most voters. This article shows how regulations hidden within Guelph's planning regulations add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of condominiums, raise rents significantly, prevent the creation of walkable urban neighbourhoods, and, ruin public transit. 

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 The High Cost of Free Parking in Guelph

"The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone possess such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city",  Lewis Mumford 

Lewis Mumford
Primitivojumento,
 Wiki Commons

During my Quixotic attempt to run for Guelph Council, I found that the one issue guaranteed to generate the most phone calls was parking. People get absolutely enraged when they receive a parking ticket. And no more vicious and brutal animosity seems to be created than a battle between two neighbours over a parking spot. Since I've never actually owned a automobile (although I had two motorcycles and a moped), I've always found this emotional commitment hard to understand.

After working through parts of Donald Shoup's encyclopedic The High Cost of Free Parking, I think that I am starting to "get" parking.  The key issue is the assumption that anyone who has made the investment of buying a car believes that they automatically gain the right to free parking for as long as they own it.

It's easy to see how this idea came to be. At first, cars were just something that rich people had. And this meant that there was plenty of space at the side of the road for them to park. And since rich folks tend to live on large properties, there is generally a place for them to store their cars. The problem with parking only started when cars became very popular.

When middle-class people started to own autos, a new business was created in large cities---commercial parking garages. These places stored your car when you weren't using it. They came about because existing apartment buildings---being built in the pre-automotive era---didn't have parking spaces provided for tenants. In fact, if you watch old movies you will often hear dialogue or plot devices that hinge around the fact that a person has rented a space in another building to store

Donald Shoup by his permission

their car. When these middle-class folks went downtown, they found that most businesses didn't have parking either. This meant that they either parked at the curb---if they could find a space---or paid a fee to park in a private, for-profit, parking lot. Since there was no guarantee that they will find a space at the curb, or a lot near where they were going, they often decided to just take a cab or public transit. People didn't hop in their cars to go downtown, because parking was often too much of a hassle, so cars were not only less commonly owned, they were used less often.

Enter the planning departments of all North American cities. They decided that if lots of people were going to drive cars, then there had to be places for people to park them. This wouldn't have been much of a problem if drivers had been forced to pay the actual cost of parking. This would have meant that a few more privately-developed, paid parking garages and open-air lots would have been built.

Unfortunately, what happened instead was that planning departments all across North America decided to force every single new building to provide free parking for the people who rented apartments, bought condos, went to the library, worked at an office tower, ate at their restaurants, or, shopped at stores. For a variety of reasons, this has proved a disaster for cities.

All this parking dramatically increased the cost of building a new structure. When someone decides to build an apartment building, for example, they have to build not only the apartments, but also the parking that goes with it. If the apartment complex is built in an area with cheap land, then the parking can go outside the building on a basic lot. But it also means that the developer has to purchase a much bigger lot. There are other costs too, such as snow removal in the winter. All of these costs are passed on to the person who rents an apartment. This means that the parking isn't "free"---it's just a hidden cost that everyone has to pay, whether they drive or not.

Now consider a situation where planning doesn't force developers to provide "free" parking. As I mentioned before, this situation used to exist in apartment buildings that were built before the rise of the automobile. In this situation, a person who decides to live in this apartment complex and also decides to purchase an auto will be forced to find a garage or lot to park his vehicle and pay a monthly fee to do so. This also means that anyone who lives in that apartment building and who doesn't choose to own a car no longer has to subsidize the guy who does.

There is another, very important element to this issue. If a developer doesn't have to provide parking for his customers, he can dramatically shrink the size of the lot that he has to purchase. This means that it will be easier to do "in fill" development. It also means that the density of the community will rise. This will mean that the city can save money on servicing the properties. It will also increase the viability of public transit, which will lower the need to own a car in the first place. With more density, there will be more places that a renter can walk to to shop, work, or, socialize. And with more viable transit, there will be more frequent buses, which will make that option more convenient too.

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It is hard to define the cost of a generic parking spot. This is because a large part of the cost comes down to the cost of the land---which not only varies widely from city to city, but also from

neighbourhood to neighbourhood. Also, in parking structures the cost per unit is going to change based on the size of garage---simply because of the economies of scale. But Donald Shoup has come up with an approximation that will helpfully give us an "order of magnitude" to understand this issue. (All that follows comes from Chapter 6 of The High Cost of Free Parking, "The Cost of Required Parking Spaces".)

Shoup analyzed fifteen parking structures that were added to the University of California, Los Angelos (UCLA) between 1961 and 2002. He reasoned that he could ignore the land cost element of the price by calculating the number of cars that could be parked just on the footprint of the land that the building sat on, and subtracting that from the total number that could be parked in the finished structure. That net result would divided into the cost of the building (less the land acquisition price) would be the real cost of each parking spot. He then factored in inflation to come up with a price per car based on standard 2002 dollars. Since parking structures are pretty much the same in Ontario as in California, this will give us a number that is probably the same here.

In Shoup's analysis, above ground parking at UCLA came to $14,500/added space, in 2002 US dollars. Using inflation and currency converters from the Internet, this converts to $19,400 in 2016 US dollars, and $25,400 current Canadian dollars per parking spot.

One complexity that needs to be understood is that above ground parking is a lot cheaper than below ground parking. But in very dense areas developers often put below ground parking into their condominium and apartment developments, so it is very important to separate these two costs. Shoup parses out this number by looking at five different below ground parking structures and came to the following number of $25,800 US in 1998. This converts to $38,100 US in 2016 and $49,900 current Canadian dollars, per unit of underground parking.

Of course these numbers are probably a bit off one way or another. But I suspect that they do give a rough idea of how much the cost of parking adds to every building.

Now, let's look at the Guelph planning regulations vis-a-vis new apartment and condominium construction. According to the General Provisions of the Guelph Zoning Bylaws, Section 4.13, the minimum required parking spaces per unit are 1.5 for the first 20 units, and after that, it is 1.25 per unit. Since I cannot see any separate listing for condominiums, I will assume that the same rules apply. This would suggest that a condo tower or apartment with seventy-five units would require 99 parking spaces (that is 20 times 1.5, or, 30, plus 55 times 1.25, or, 68.75 or 69. 30 plus 69 equals 99.) Since space is at a premium in downtown Guelph, if they go there, these towers would have to build parking garages. At this point, by plugging in Shoup's numbers I can calculate that if they are above ground the parking spaces would cost $2,514,600 and would add $33,500 to the price of each condo or apartment. If the developer has to do below ground parking, the total cost would be $4,940,000 or $65,900 per unit.

Seeing those numbers explains to me at least part of the reason why condos cost so much!  It also probably has something to say about rents.

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These regulations raise the costs not only for housing, but also for businesses. And office building (like the Co-Operator's) requires one space for 33 square meters of "Gross Floor Area" (GFA), 16.5 square meters in a retail establishment, 7.5 square metres in a restaurant or tavern (think the Albion), and, 9 square metres in a take-out restaurant (think MacDonalds.)  It also says that Hotels have to provide a space per room plus one per 10 square metres of space open to the public (I assume things like restaurants and bars.) It also says that if a developer wants to build an apartment over top of a business (like most old downtowns), each unit must provide an off-street parking space per unit---in addition to the spaces it must provide for the business (see  4.15.2.4.)

I won't try to come up with estimates of how much these spaces cost, because that would involve an analysis of land costs in Guelph, which varies from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. The zoning regulations do set out in great detail---depending on area---the minimum size of a parking space (from 3 metres by 6 metres, to, 2.5 by 5.5.) They also prescribe "set backs" plus rules governing access to each spot, which add space requirements. Also, above a certain size of lot, a certain number of handicap spaces need to be offered.

To put this into a context, the old downtown Budd's building is currently listed as on offer for leasing as office space, with 16,606 square feet.  This converts to 149 square metres, which would require 5 parking spaces (the zoning regulations say that partial numbers are always rounded up to the next whole parking spot.) If Budd's were being newly build as a retail space, it would be required to provide 10 parking spaces. What this means is that if you want to build a new store like Budd's, you would have to provide a parking space that would be at least 180 metres square. But that number doesn't include required set-backs and access lanes, which might add as much as one third more to the size of the lot, making the ultimate size about 240 metres square.

In it's present configuration, the Budd's building has a basement. If a developer was going to build a new structure like it, he would be purchasing much cheaper land outside of the downtown core, which means that he probably wouldn't be building basement space into it, as this is only done when land costs go above a certain amount. So I'd suggest that probably this new store would probably only be two stories at most, which means that a 149 square metre store would probably end up having a footprint of 75 square metres at the very least. It would be fair to say, therefore, that the parking regulations would result in the developer having to assemble a lot that is at least 255 square metres, or, 2744.8 square feet. This is also how parking regulations dramatically lower the density of cities.

As a result of these parking regulations, it is effectively against the law for anyone to build a store like the old Budds, Ackers, and, other downtown businesses. The only way they were able to survive as long as they did was because they had been "grandfathered" as legal, non-conforming. If anyone wonders why we have big, sprawling cities that are too low density to have a proper public transit system, the answer is simply that it is against the law to build them any other way. The laws that force businesses to do this all come down to parking.

The old Budds store. It would be totally illegal to build something like this today.
Photo by Bill Hulet

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If we are ever going to build the sort of higher-density, sustainable cities we are going to have to stop forcing all developers from having to devote enormous amounts of resources to providing off-street parking. The fundamental problem is a misallocation of resources. People who do not own a car, and have no interest in ever owning one have to pay as much as $74,000 extra on their condo unit simply because our zoning assumes that everyone will own a car. The fact that most people who buy condos in the downtown do so specifically because they don't want to have to drive everywhere is completely lost on these regulations.

Of course, there are going to be people who really do want to own car and have a parking space in their building. But the way to deal with this problem is to let the people who want to drive cars PAY for the privilege instead of forcing everyone who doesn't to subsidize their lifestyle choice. Developers will learn how many units that they actually need in a building.  If they build too few, they will suffer. If they build too many, then they will get "stuck" with spaces that they will have to rent to outsiders. Some business people might see an opportunity and build parking garages outside of condominiums in cheaper parts of town for the people who will be happy to use transit for commuting and just drive on special occasions.

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The obvious response to the above suggestion is that people will drive cars without paying for a parking space and businesses will have customers with no place to park. The result will be total chaos. The essential answer to this problem is to allow the marketplace to set the price.

The best way to understand this point is to consider the lowly parking meter. The first thing to

Let this light your Way!
Lorax, Wiki Commons

realize is that parking meters are not about raising money. Instead, their job is to ensure that people who really want to park on the curb will be able to find a spot. Consider the number of parking spaces that would be free in downtown Guelph if parking were totally free. The fact is that the folks who work downtown would park their cars on the curb and the "lot" would be full all day long. The other option to consider is what the curb parking would look like if the meters charged $20/hour---there'd be no problem at all finding a place to park. The issue is to figure out what to charge to find the "sweet spot" where there are always going to be spots available, but you aren't chasing away everyone who really does want a place to park.

Traffic engineers have done studies and found out that there actually is an optimal amount of curb parking usage. According to Shoup, they suggest that one in seven spaces (15%) should be free at any given moment. This amount is probably going to be high enough during peak times of the day to ensure that if someone wants to park their car for extended periods of time---like an entire eight hour shift---they won't be willing to pay that much money. As a result, they will seek out lower cost alternatives, like either taking transit, car-pooling, or, finding a lot with lower charges.

There will be "hardy folks" who will attempt to bypass the free market by parking at the curb in surrounding residential streets. There are ways to discourage this behaviour too. Locals who live in the area could be issued passes that allow them and visitors to park at the curb. Anyone without a pass on their dashboard would be subject to fines. What if someone decides to rent out or sell their pass? No problem! The amount that they charge the person parking is itself part of the marketplace. The only thing that the city might want to do is to take steps to prevent counterfeit parking passes and to publish a "going rate" for passes to ensure that people charge enough to ensure that same 15% turnover that will ensure that there are still spaces when the locals need to put their car on the curb. (Presumably this will be significantly less than the downtown rate because of the inconvenience of having to walk downtown after parking.)

If you really want to get fancy, the meters could all be controlled electronically to allow the city to charge different rates at different times of day. Obviously there are going to be "busy" and "slow" times. The rates needed to keep 15% of the spaces open will be different at different times. There may be variation from one day of the week to another, and perhaps from one season to another.

Hi-tech parking meter!
Wiki Commons

"Smart" meters would be able to keep track of all that information and help parking departments keep up with change. They could also be linked to cell phone apps that would help motorists find the spaces that are open and pay for the time that they wish to park.  

The important issue is that people who drive cars would begin to start understanding the real cost of having to provide parking for their vehicle. The flip side is that anyone building apartments, condos, burger joints, or, dress shops would no longer have to create parking spaces that people may or may not want to use. At first, this probably wouldn't make much difference, as most businesses would be afraid of losing customers who couldn't find a place to park. But eventually some plucky pioneers would decide that the savings in cost would be worth the risk. They might even put some apartments over top of the store to augment the income from commercial renters. Some business people might decide that they want to live upstairs from their business.

The first places where this might happen would probably be at spots where there is a lot of public transit. Some place on the Gordon street transit corridor would be a good spot, perhaps. There would probably have to be some sort of direction from City Hall. Perhaps a consortium of business people could plan a new secondary "downtown" for the city where the goal is a walkable neighbourhood. It could be specifically aimed at that fraction of the population that really doesn't care to own a car. This might be a mixture of those young "hipsters" who aren't interested in cars and older "boomers" who are retired and don't want the hassle anymore.

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One thing that probably is going to make this transition happen even faster is the rise of both Uber and self-driving cars. The government of the USA is "fast tracking" the introduction of self-driving cars, this means that they are probably going to quickly become part of the landscape here in Canada. And this is going to mean a great deal to parking. When they become an accepted part of society, a lot of people are going to have apps on their phones that will allow them to call for a self-driving car that will pick them up and take them wherever they want to go. This means that they really have no reason at all to own or park their own car. This means that there will no longer be as many people who need a parking space where they live or work. It also means that when they go shopping instead of parking a car, they will just get let off and call for another one when they are finished. In the interim, the cars will be off driving other customers around instead of sitting in a parking space gathering dust.

This won't be much different from calling a cab, but they will be cheaper. This is because they will have all the same upfront expenses but without having to pay for a driver. Since running your own car costs something like $10,000 a year in Canada, increasing numbers of people are going to start asking "why do I have to pay all this money, plus grotesquely-subsidize parking fees in the price of everything I buy, when I can just take transit or push an app on my phone to get a car?"

A Google self-driving car---the final nail in the coffin for subsidized parking?
Steve Jurvetson from the Wiki Commons

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This issue of where parking is going is tremendously important for Guelph's future. Right now the city is developing a parking master plan for the future of the downtown. As the city website says:

Through the Places to Grow Act the Province of Ontario requires increased population density for communities including downtown Guelph. As well, over the next 16 years the number of people who work and live downtown will double from 8,000 to about 16,000 people and jobs and as a result there is a need to plan to have sufficient parking for people living, working and visiting downtown.

Public parking infrastructure downtown has not increased since 1983 when Guelph had a population of 70,000 and as a result, on-street parking and parking lots in the downtown core are at capacity. To accommodate downtown population and employment growth targets, an additional 1,300 to 1,700 parking spaces are needed by 2031. These new parking spaces will be created by replacing downtown parking lots with a series of parkades, starting with 350 new stalls (anticipated to be the Wilson Street parking lot) and followed by 250 new stalls (anticipated to be the Neeve Street parking lot).

I am assuming that these 1300 new parking spaces will be in above ground structures, which means that according to Stroup's numbers ($25,400 per space), the cost of building them will be about over $33 million dollars. Now, Stroup has worked through a mechanism for estimating how much money drivers need to pony up to pay for each space. I will try to work through his reasoning as follows.

The first cost is that of paying for building the structure. Stroup assumes that this can be done over 40 years. Let's assume that the city can get the money at 3% for 40 years. I Googled an amortization calculator and plugged in the numbers. At 3% over 40 years, the total capital cost is $56,705,000 (capital plus interest.) This translates into a monthly cost of $118,000. Divide that into 1300 spaces, and each parking space will have to create an average of $91 of revenue a month---just to pay the capital costs. Stroup's analysis of UCLA's parking budget says that it spends a further $33/month on maintenance, administration, and so on. These are 2002 US dollars, which convert to $58 in 2016 Canadian dollars. Add them together and it should cost about $149/month.

OK, not every space is going to be taken up by a monthly pass. Some of them will be rented to shoppers. If a space has to generate $150 of revenue a month, that only means it has to generate $5 a day. That should be relatively easy, shouldn't it?

Well, yes and no. Consider the fact that the lot is not going to be full up most days. Let's be really optimistic and assume that on peak days it will only have 10% excess capacity on any day. That means that only 1170 spaces will be in use. Divide $118,000 by 1,170 and you get $101 a month. But, you don't have to add $58 in maintenance to this number, but instead a larger number---because maintenance is a fixed cost, just like capital. This means that the cost per filled parking space has just gone up to $64 per space. That means that at 90% occupancy, the cost per customer comes to $165 per month.

OK, not every space is going to be taken up by a monthly pass. Some of them will be rented to shoppers. If a space has to generate $150 of revenue a month, that only means it has to generate $5 a day. That should be relatively easy, shouldn't it?

Well, yes and no. Don't forget that parking is something that fluctuates dramatically from day to day. Lots are often empty on specific days of the week, such as Sundays. They also empty out on holidays---such as Christmas. Let's assume that the lot downtown will not be used at all on four Sundays plus one holiday a month. That means that we can only count on 25 days a month when we can generate revenue from casual drivers as opposed to people with monthly passes. That means that the space has to generate $6 a day. Not a huge increase.

If you look at what a monthly pass for parking downtown currently costs, you can see that the biggest charge is only $92 and the cheapest is $40.  Hourly parking in the lots is $2 for a ten hour period, Monday to Friday, with a flat fee of $2 on Saturdays and $5 for special events. Sundays are free.

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The problem with all of Guelph's downtown parking plan is that it assumes that the future is going to be just like the past. And the one thing that I feel confident saying about the future is that just isn't going to be the same as what people are used to. Climate change means that we are going to have to transition to a carbon free economy in a very short part of time. I suspect that there are going to still be personal transportation devices (probably electric)---but there probably going to be a lot fewer of them. And a lot of them are probably going to be more like self-driving, taxis than personally-owned automobiles. Mainly, I suspect that there is going to be a lot more public transit in use. The fact that GO transit is expanding, a high-speed train for the Windsor to Quebec City corridor has been promised, and, Kitchener-Waterloo will soon have light rail all suggest to me that the number of people using cars will be declining in the near future.

Even more to the point, the transition to this new reality is not going to happen everywhere at the same time. I dare say that this new way of living is going to happen in downtown Guelph before just about anywhere else in the city or the province. People move to Guelph to be on the cutting edge of environmental issues, and the people who do that usually want to move downtown if they can.  What this means to me is that if we "get it wrong", the city will be wasting many millions of dollars on parking garages that will spend a large part of their life empty. This would again---as with so many things parking related---a profound misallocation of resources.

I would suggest, in contrast, that---in at least the downtown core---the city should rip up the off-street parking regulations and let the free market decide. Apartments, condos, and, commercial buildings will be a lot cheaper if developers don't have to provide parking spaces for people---whether they want them or not. If it turns out that I am wrong and there remains a tremendous need for downtown parking, let some business person step in and build a private parking garage where he can charge the real cost. Just stop trying to force me to pay for someone else's right to destroy the planet with with their gas-guzzling, climate changing, death wagon.  ;-)