The Design Regina community plan says parking should not be the dominant image of streets, but the city is still far from reaching that goal downtown, according to one expert.

The plan, released in September 2009, states the city should strive to have parking go relatively unnoticed in its layout. This means no new surface parking lots downtown unless they are screened by storefronts or other users.

Vanessa Mathews, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography & Environmental Studies at the University of Regina, said parking space still takes up a lot of the downtown core and much of that space could be put to better use.

"If we're wanting to move away from a car culture, then we need to have more residential spaces in the downtown, so that people are able to walk to work and choose different types of transit to move around," Mathews said.

Parking lots don't contribute to an animated downtown, she said, and there's currently an imbalance between park and parking lot spaces in the city.

According to the city, there are 69 surface parking lots within the downtown neighbourhood, totalling about nine hectares. The figure only includes lots with no buildings on them. The boundaries of downtown are from Angus to Osler Street and 13 Avenue to the Railway.

Mathews said she would like to see more residential, green and open spaces in the downtown core. Downtown parking could be re-thought by introducing more multi-story parking lots or incorporating parking into different elements of new developments. She also called for more investment into public transit.

She suggested creating incentives for particular forms of development over others to bring about change.

"It's also about thinking about the different kinds of uses beyond those measures as well, to help incentivize and bring out the types of uses and spaces that we're after," Mathews said.

With files from Emily Pasiuk