5619 replies to this topic

[Mystic-Pizza]

Sure, either way you need proof that you met the requirements for parking in the area.

Friends don't usually issue invoices for your visit

 

In a "Free" society should any of us really have to show proof that we have met the requirements to park on crown land?  Why are their requirements in the first place?  I have lived in Victoria  for the better part of 40 years, I have lived in Toronto and other parts of Vancouver Island as well, and I personally have never had any issues with city parking. It is what it is. In a "Free" and "Democratic" society, people have the right to park their vehicles anywhere they choose to because they require to be in that location or near that location for whatever personal activities they may be carrying out without question. Personally in Victoria, I have never gone without a parking space when I needed one. Sometimes I have to go to parkades,or sometimes I have to park 2 or 3 blocks away from my destination But that is OK with me, because who am I to dictate where or what other vehicle owners are doing in the down town or even why they are doing it?  it's none of my business. Their is always a parking spot if you need it. It may not be exactly where you wanted it to be, but it's always there.

[tjv]

Sure, either way you need proof that you met the requirements for parking in the area.

Friends don't usually issue invoices for your visit

If its a friends place, all you need is a bill or something with their address on it

[Cats4Hire]

In a "Free" and "Democratic" society, people have the right to park their vehicles anywhere they choose to because they require to be in that location or near that location for whatever personal activities they may be carrying out without question. 

Cool can you tell me what places allow me to park up on the sidewalk or right in front of the store so the only way in or out is the crawl through my car? Do they have jump pads to let me park my car on the roof too since I might want a nice view while I park. Might suck if the guy in front of me decides to just park in the middle of the street in a way that doesn't let anyone pass though.

[Mystic-Pizza]

Cool can you tell me what places allow me to park up on the sidewalk or right in front of the store so the only way in or out is the crawl through my car? Do they have jump pads to let me park my car on the roof too since I might want a nice view while I park. Might suck if the guy in front of me decides to just park in the middle of the street in a way that doesn't let anyone pass though.

 

You know I was referring to designated parking spots and the system of charging people to park in them.  As in people should have the right to park in  them free of charge. That does not eliminate parking regulation, just parking fees.  Nobody should have to pay to park anywhere. Sidney is a perfect example of how FREE street parking not only works in a busy town that gets tons of daily vehicle traffic, but is extremely successful and always has been. The  parking spots in Sidney are regulated, but are FREE to use.

 

Parking regulation in itself is what keeps people from leaving their cars in a spot for too long.....not the fee they are being charged to park there, but the Fee they will receive (ticket) if they park longer then the time permitted. So the size of the municipality has nothing to do with it.

 

In Victoria, the city could completely eliminate paid parking and make every spot simply "Time Limited" as they already do with many of the street spots down town, and as they do in Saanich or in Oak Bay, or in Sidney.

 

As a matter of fact the municipality of Victoria is the only municipality out of all of them that charges people for street parking.  

 

Then one would say it's a major loss of revenue if the city were to stop charging for parking, when in reality their are plenty of other options to replace that revenue including increasing parking ticket fees, and or eliminating city manager positions that are redundant, among many other options.

Edited by Mystic-Pizza, 09 December 2018 - 10:26 AM.

[Mike K.]

In Russia the car parks you.

[tedward]

In Victoria, the city could completely eliminate paid parking and make every spot simply "Time Limited" as they already do with many of the street spots down town, and as they do in Saanich or in Oak Bay, or in Sidney.

 

I'd rather they replaced all "residential" parking with time-limited spots. The "residential" rules are ridiculous. Keep it simple: X time, on Y-Z days.

[sdwright.vic]

Don't understand why people with private property think they have exclusive rights to the public property in front of there private property. Park in your driveway not enough room, make it bigger.

[Ismo07]

Some great conversations, I'll see if I can touch on each.

 

Residential parking:  It can be a very tricky issue.  There are thoughts that it should be removed completely and let everyone park where and when they would like.  You may be in favour of this unless you are close to a major employment centre, event centre, a school, hospital or in an area with multi-family dwellings.  Many cities do enforce them differently where some issue permits (cost associated) and some by complaint.  Victoria has always done this by complaint rather the permit route.  Using permits creates more patrollers to check the permits, it also creates many more interactions between the public and Parking Services.  In 2017 the City cancelled under 1,600 tickets in residential zones, if it was a permit system it would be around 15,000 permits issued annually.  That is a big difference when we talk about interactions.  Always willing to discuss other ways to provide residential parking but let's try to understand both sides.  I'm not championing any way specifically, there is no perfect way and any changes will bring just as many issues, if not more, than our current system. 

 

Paid parking:  There are really only a couple of ways to ensure turn-over when it comes to vehicles.  Time limits and place a fee on the service of parking, usually this is done in the same manner.  Limited time zones do not typically function well in a vibrant downtown core as we notice outside the core many limited time zones are utilized by commuters (move from block to block every two hours).  Yes you should normally find a parking space in the downtown core, that has a lot to do with the current restrictions.  Making comparisons of smaller downtowns to Victoria might not be the best way to determine if Victoria's downtown should be free or not.  It's more important to look at that turnover.  In 2014, the City reduced the fees of most of the metered parking spots as well as the parkades.  I'm not sure you will ever see a free downtown core as it is simply too busy.  Parking revenues are also a way to pay for other services and reduce property taxes.  The goal is for people to pay for the service they use and reduce parking tickets.  Typically people do not mind pay for their parking, their issue is more getting the ticket.

 

Should we set up a roundtable?

Edited by Ismo07, 10 December 2018 - 01:01 PM.

[sdwright.vic]

I would say there is an administrative cost associated to the complaint model as well. Someone has to respond to the complaint, and someone has to be paid to forgive all those tickets that have been.

Secondly, so what if you live i a major employment centre, event centre, a school, hospital or in an area with multi-family dwellings area. Still you park on your property and any street parking available should be accessible by anyone. Everyone pays equally for access to the roads, because your property directly fronts one of those road shouldn't give you exclusive access.

[Mystic-Pizza]

Some great conversations, I'll see if I can touch on each.

 

Residential parking:  It can be a very tricky issue.  There are thoughts that it should be removed completely and let everyone park where and when they would like.  You may be in favour of this unless you are close to a major employment centre, event centre, a school, hospital or in an area with multi-family dwellings.  Many cities do enforce them differently where some issue permits (cost associated) and some by complaint.  Victoria has always done this by complaint rather the permit route.  Using permits creates more patrollers to check the permits, it also creates many more interactions between the public and Parking Services.  In 2017 the City cancelled under 1,600 tickets in residential zones, if it was a permit system it would be around 15,000 permits issued annually.  That is a big difference when we talk about intereactions.  Always willing to discuss other ways to provide residential parking but let's try to understand both sides.  I'm not championing any way specifically, there is no perfect way and any changes will bring just as many issues, if not more, than our current system. 

 

Paid parking:  There are really only a couple of ways to ensure turn-over when it comes to vehicles.  Time limits and place a fee on the service of parking, usually this is done in the same manner.  Limited time zones do not typically function well in a vibrant downtown core as we notice outside the core many limited time zones are utilized by commuters (move from block to block every two hours).  Yes you should normally find a parking space in the downtown core, that has a lot to do with the current restrictions.  Making comparisons of smaller downtowns to Victoria might not be the best way to determine if Victoria's downtown should be free or not.  It's more important to look at that turnover.  In 2014, the City reduced the fees of most of the metered parking spots as well as the parkades.  I'm not sure you will ever see a free downtown core as it is simply too busy.  Parking revenues are also a way to pay for other services and reduce property taxes.  The goal is for people to pay for the service they use and reduce parking tickets.  Typically people do not mind pay for their parking, their issue is more getting the ticket.

 

Should we set up a roundtable?

 

 

I would say this: Increase the fines for tickets issued that are not related to paid spots (parking past the time permitted, parking is passenger zones, yellow lines, red lines, handi-cap spots etc) that sort of thing to help cover the loss in paid parking revenue. Tickets for parking past the time permitted is only one offense out of dozens that vehicles can be ticketed for in Victoria. Trust me if the fine for parking longer in a timed spot doubled and or ticket fines doubled on all parking infractions, people would not be messing around. They would be back to get their car on time. Another thing that could be done if paid parking spots was eliminated that would help cover the loss would be to remove the reduced ticket fee option that we currently have if a ticket is paid in 14 days or whatever it is and just charge the full amount. These options alone as far as I am concerned would keep the turn around at least as good as it already is.

 

I believe FREE parking can and would work in down town Victoria if you simply make the adjustments to financially accommodate it.

Edited by Mystic-Pizza, 10 December 2018 - 10:00 AM.

[Ismo07]

 

I believe FREE parking can and would work in down town Victoria if you simply make the adjustments to financially accommodate it.

 

I know that you believe that.  I'd like to see where a purely enforcement and punitive tactic works.  Increasing ticket fines simply creates animosity and hardship.  We see this already with the lower fine amounts.  Another issue becomes commuters who move their vehicles every 2 hours (or less).  You would slowly see absolutely no spaces in the downtown core as downtown employees rotate their vehicles, which does not lend itself to a dynamic downtown.

 

Let me know what cities have tried a free downtown (I can think of one and they are struggling now building a parkade rather than charging).  Please use major centres where weekdays have full office buildings open for business, not smaller municipal main streets.  At the beginning of my earlier post I mentioned there are 2 ways to influence turnover.  Once time limits no long create enough turnover urban centres turn to pricing.  Downtown has fewer parking spaces than businesses (by a lot).  Parking fine reviews outweigh discussions about parking rates.  I actually receive many positive comments about parking rates, well compared to the fees associated with fines.  Revenue from on-street parking will be a little over $7M, parking violations closer to $2.5M collected.  That's a big difference to overcome if the model was to be revenue neutral.

 

Trust me tickets are not the way to ensure turnover.

[tjv]

I've done contracts in residential areas and had a municipality (not the CoV) demand to know how I was to make sure workers don't park in residential zones?  How the heck am I supposed to do that

[Ismo07]

I would say there is an administrative cost associated to the complaint model as well. Someone has to respond to the complaint, and someone has to be paid to forgive all those tickets that have been.

Secondly, so what if you live i a major employment centre, event centre, a school, hospital or in an area with multi-family dwellings area. Still you park on your property and any street parking available should be accessible by anyone. Everyone pays equally for access to the roads, because your property directly fronts one of those road shouldn't give you exclusive access.

That admin cost is much less, but it is true someone has to pick up the phone.  If we went to permits I believe it would take another staff and possibly two to administer the permits and to deal with the extra tickets issued to guests.

 

As to your 2nd point, I don't really disagree with you but there are people without driveways, or enough.  So if you lived near the arena and you were coming home from where ever on an evening of a major concert, you could find yourself 5 or 6 blocks away if there was not residential or around the hospital or legislation and downtown during the day.  Think of this as more of a macro issue rather than micro.  The space usage would be wildly different.  In 2017 we cancelled less than 1,000 tickets who were visiting or contracted services.

 

I will say that we are beginning to track when calls come in and measure that with how many spaces are on the block compared with how many vehicles there are at the time.

 

TJV there is always a concern about what the impact is to whatever work being done or development to traffic and parking for the nearby residents and area users.

Edited by Ismo07, 10 December 2018 - 12:47 PM.

[FogPub]

Two big new civic parkades need to be built ASAP.

 

One somewhere in the area of the legislature/museum, intended to handle a combination of museum traffic (the museum's own parking is woefully inadequate), tourists, and some legislature-area commuters.

 

The other somewhere in the area of the arena-crystal pool-royal athletic park, this would be a very big one to handle arena events and downtown workers.  In tandem with this would be a hop-on hop-off bus or shuttle system that ran up and down Blanshard from the arena to about Humboldt as often as possible - ideally every 5 minutes during the day from about 6 a.m. on, getting progressively less frequent after about 6 p.m. until it'd quit at about 10 - with your parking pass acting as a ticket to ride.

 

Far better use of money than some things I've seen...

Edited by FogPub, 10 December 2018 - 03:52 PM.

[tjv]

^not disagreeing with you in the slightest but Helps and the last council said it was basically the private sectors responsibility and I don't see this new council being any different.  The priority is bike lanes!

[sdwright.vic]

How about this? Every new high rise is required to provide x number of public parking spaces that they get to own outright for x number of years, then they become city property after that time?

In that case a $10K to construct parking spack would take four years to recover at $120 a month.

Every new building has even 50 new parking spaces, by the time downtown is rebuilt. Plenty of parking spread across town.

[Mike K.]

The cost to build an underground parking stall is around $40k.

[nerka]

I personally like the idea of paid downtown street parking Sunday and free parkade.

 

I think that is a good idea separate from the free bus pass issue that has been tied to it.

[sdwright.vic]

The cost to build an underground parking stall is around $40k.

Regardless of price.. I still think x number of years to recover cost

[tjv]

In that case it would just be cheaper for a private developer to build a new parkade completely above ground.  Last I checked we have no one interested