In 1978 Toronto’s downtown had massive areas dedicated to surface parking. Many of these areas resembled the giant suburban parking lots you see adjacent to today’s commuter train stations, but within walking distance of Toronto’s central business district.

Over the past 40 years real estate developers and city council have slowly transformed these essentially vacant lots to accommodate some of Toronto’s most iconic structures, such as the Skydome (or whatever it’s called now), the ACC (ditto), and many other residential buildings, hotels and office towers.

Using historical aerial imagery and data describing the current extent of surface parking in Toronto’s – from the City of Toronto’s Open Data Portal, we were able to quantify this decades-long transition. The maps below show all surface parking in black for years 1978 and 2019.

Sidenote - since its inception the Toronto Open Data Portal has been an incredible resource and recently they have accelerated their offerings, which we very much appreciate.