Public servants need parking. Downtown Ottawa has lost 3,000 spots

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.

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The City of Ottawa doesn’t keep an annual inventory of parking spots, but two “comprehensive” collection efforts — one in 2016 and another 2025 — paint a clear picture of dwindling parking supply in the city’s core.

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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.

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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.

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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 into the core — and many public servants who work in the dense cluster of downtown office buildings are bracing for hotter competition for a place to park.

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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.

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Less parking, more possibilities

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Derrick Simpson, transit chair with the Centretown Community Association, said fewer parking spots downtown “isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

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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.

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“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.”

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In fact, he said, city policies in recent years have explicitly incentivized the redevelopment of parking lots.

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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.

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The City of Ottawa’s Official Plan, 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.

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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.