Parking lot paving in Ottawa, sized, structured and phased

Three hundred square feet per car, and what that tells you

The quickest honest check on whether a property can hold the parking you need is area per space. Allowing for the stall itself plus its share of the drive aisle and manoeuvring room, a surface parking space works out at roughly 300 to 350 square feet. Run that arithmetic before anything else. Ten thousand square feet of usable area is somewhere around thirty spaces, not the fifty that stall dimensions alone would suggest. The aisle is not wasted area, it is what makes the stalls reachable, and it is where the heaviest turning loads land. Once the count is realistic, the rest of the design follows: where the accessible stalls go and how their access aisles connect to the building entrance, where the drive aisle runs, how a delivery vehicle turns without mounting a curb, and where the low point is going to be. Layout first, structure second, surface last.

Where the water goes on a flat lot

A driveway has a road to drain to. A parking lot mostly does not. It is a large, nearly flat impermeable surface, and every millimetre of rain that lands on it has to be collected and taken somewhere deliberate. That makes drainage the second decision, before grading and long before paving. Catch basin positions get fixed first, then the finished levels are built to fall toward them. Do it the other way round and the low point is chosen by accident. In Ottawa that is not cosmetic. With 757.2 mm of rain and 231.9 cm of snow a year against the 1991 to 2020 normals, standing water becomes ice, then a saturated base, then a failure in March when the subgrade loses bearing capacity on thaw. The City projects freeze-thaw cycling rising 15 percent by the 2030s and 35 percent by the 2050s, so anything that holds water will be tested harder in future than it has been so far.

Stall count, not square footage, sizes a parking lot paving job

Almost every parking lot conversation starts in the wrong place. The owner has an area and wants to know what it costs to pave. The useful question is how many vehicles have to park on it, because that decides the layout, and the layout decides everything downstream.

The number to work with is roughly 300 to 350 square feet per space once drive aisles and manoeuvring room are included. Stall dimensions alone suggest something much tighter, but a stall nobody can reach is not a space. Twelve thousand square feet of usable area holds somewhere in the mid thirties, not the sixty that a tidy grid on paper might promise.

That arithmetic also exposes the constraints early. Accessible stalls and their access aisles take more room than standard spaces and have to sit on the shortest accessible route to the entrance. A delivery vehicle needs a turning path that does not cross the parking field. Snow has to go somewhere in January, and a lot designed with no storage area loses stalls to windrows every winter.

Why parking lot paving is quoted per project, not per square foot

Residential asphalt in this market has established bands. New builds run roughly $5 to $10 per square foot and remove and repave runs $8 to $14. Those are residential figures for residential driveways.

Commercial lots are a different matter, and we will be straight about why we do not publish a rate for them. We could not verify any Ottawa or Canadian per square foot price for commercial lot paving. The American figures that circulate convert to roughly $2.78 to $6.24 per square foot, which sits below the Ottawa residential rate for a considerably heavier structural section. That is not plausible for this market, and publishing it would make our quote look expensive against a number that does not apply here.

So commercial lots get quoted per project, after a site assessment. Any workmanship warranty is set out in your written quote, job by job. Call (343) 314-8525.