Greater Vancouver could be the first Cascadian metropolitan area to impose what transportation and smart-growth reformers have long advocated: a metro-wide tax on parking spaces to help pay for road maintenance and transit, as today’s Vancouver Sunreports (subscription required).
The tax would fall on all nonresidential parking stalls and might come to about $28 per year.
The province has a lot of work to do on the specifics before the tax could be voted on in the legislative assembly. And there’s an election in the offing, so don’t count on action immediately. But momentum for the parking tax has been strong in Vancouver, at least compared to Seattle and Portland, both of which essentially gave up on their attempts at taxing parking stalls over the last two years.
Parking taxes, like fuel taxes, are a good way to pay for transportation, because they help make prices tell the truth about the full costs of driving.
