4:1 parking ratio
← All revisions
docs(building-design): add 6 new TOPICs from redaction-reviewed design-collaboration source (4:1 parking ratio, design sequence priority, Common Building Code, water management system, tile-level climate zoning, structural bay depth discipline), plus Sub-Prototype and Campus Design BIM-massing supplements
@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ --- schema: foundry-doc-v1 title: "4:1 parking ratio" slug: four-to-one-parking-ratio category: building-design type: topic content_type: topic quality: pre-build status: active audience: customer-woodfine bcsc_class: current-fact language_protocol: PROSE-TOPIC last_edited: 2026-08-24 editor: pointsav-engineering short_description: "The four-stalls-per-1,000-square-foot parking standard Woodfine applies in Regional Markets, where the private automobile is the only practical way a tenant's customers reach the building." paired_with: building-design/four-to-one-parking-ratio.es.md --- Woodfine parks its Regional Market office buildings at a 4:1 ratio — four full-size stalls per 1,000 square feet of net leasable area — because the private automobile, not transit or walking, is how tenants and their customers reach the site. The ratio is not a code minimum applied reluctantly; it is a design input set ahead of the [[fixed-floor-plates|Fixed Floor Plate]] and used to calculate the building's floor count. ## The ratio by development class The 4:1 standard applies to Professional Centres and Suburban Office. Suburban Office adds up to 1.5 levels of underground parking within the building footprint, which raises its achievable floor count relative to Professional Centres, which carry no underground parking. Retail Select is parked at three stalls per 1,000 square feet net leasable — a lighter ratio offset by the higher rent Retail Select tenants pay for it. Tech Industrial is parked at one stall per 1,000 square feet net leasable, reflecting its lower daily visitor volume relative to office and retail space. Every stall is full-size — 9 feet by 20 feet — with separate allocation for accessibility stalls, EV charging, and motorcycles, and no stall sits more than 75 metres from its building entrance. ## What it replaces The ratio replaces an assumption imported from transit-served Metro Area planning: that a development can be scaled down on parking and up on landscaping or density as if its residents will eventually give up the private automobile. Woodfine's development experience across Regional Markets does not support that assumption. A building under-designed for automobile access sees the practical consequence directly — vehicles cannot circulate through an undersized lot, tenants' customers report the experience as inconvenient or unsafe, and National Tenants who signed during pre-leasing decline to renew once their Users push back. A vacated anchor space costs the co-location prestige the whole site was built to capture, and a landlord facing turnover of that kind has far less leverage to hold rent at renewal. ## The parking lot as landscaped infrastructure The ratio is paired with a design requirement, not just a stall count: oversized laneways and oversized sidewalks running through the parking area, and landscaping substantial enough to shade both pedestrians and parked vehicles. A parking field sized correctly but landscaped as bare pavement defeats the human-scale intent of the standard — the ratio and the landscaping requirement are applied together, not as separable line items. ## Setting the building's floor count Floor count is calculated backward from the 4:1 ratio and the 75-metre walking-distance limit, not forward from a floor-area-ratio maximum. Woodfine's rough planning guide from its Test Sites treats one acre of land as roughly one floor of office, and one level of underground parking as roughly one more. Where a site yields a fractional floor after that division, Woodfine drops the remainder and fills the site's remaining coverage with Retail Select or Tech Industrial rather than adding partial office floors the parking ratio cannot support. This discipline is deliberate: over-building against a fixed parking constraint produces a larger asset without a larger yield, which is a use of capital Woodfine does not make. ## See also - [[fixed-floor-plates]] — the seven Floor Plates whose height range is bounded by this ratio - [[key-plans-and-tiles]] — the leasehold geometry the parking ratio is calculated alongside - [[design-sequence-priority]] — where parking sits in the collaboration sequence relative to Building Services and Structural - [[power-centre-co-location-thesis]] — the site-selection discipline this ratio supports