By Luke Barry
The daily commute. For many, it’s a real ordeal. For others, it’s a walk in or through the park. Those of us who drive to work are inevitably faced with having to find somewhere to park.
In Lowertown West, the daily parking games have created a tension between local residents who compete for limited on-street parking with non-residents who work in the area.
An abuse or a loophole?
“A lot of residents feel that employees of DFATD (Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development), not just DFATD, but non-residents use the street parking to their advantage,” local resident Leah Resnick said. “When the by-law officers come to check the parking, they put a little bit of chalk on the tires and just by the fact of moving the car from one spot to the next with their colleague, they’re able to move the car three times in the day and then avoid paying for parking where they work.”
“I know from where I live, on Cumberland in front of the little parkette especially, because it’s three-hour parking, essentially they come out on their coffee break and they shuffle the cars around.”
The issue is one Ward 12 Councillor Mathieu Fleury is well aware of.
“There is a hodge-podge of one-hour, two-hour, three-hour parking in both Lowertown West in the residential area and Lowertown in The Wedge,” Councillor Fleury said. “We got a mandate from the community association to launch a survey and initially we were proposing a two-hour blanket on street parking, Monday to Friday, 7 to 6, and the association said we would prefer to make it a one-hour, Monday to Friday, 7 to 6, so the process has now been brewing and the city is reviewing it.”
“We are going to launch an online survey [in the fall]; every resident who might be impacted will receive a letter at their address to engage on the survey and get their feedback.”
Where the rubber meets the road for most people is cost.
“I work in the area and you know it’s $150 dollars or sometimes more depending on where you work,” Resnick said. “If you do for some reason get tagged or ticketed, the fines are relatively low so I think some people also just bank on the fact ‘Well if I get two tickets a month, it’s still cheaper than parking where I work.’”
Canada is a suburban nation.
According to 2016 census data, 67.5 percent of all Canadians lived in some form of a suburb. It is safe to say the car–the primary transportation option for suburbanites–is here to stay. It should come as no surprise then that Ottawa in general and Lowertown in particular is faced with such a dilemma, given the current regulation and availability of on-street parking.
The question is what can be done about it?
“We’ll see the results of that [fall] survey, but the intent is to create an environment where we encourage residents who live in the area to benefit from that on-street and for those who use it, to use it on a short-term basis, not to work in the area, come by car and abuse those on-street residential spaces,” Fleury said. “The results of the survey will either confirm or amend the proposal and the City will then present their findings to the community.”
At the heart of the matter are the discrepancies in the parking zones, according to Resnick.
“We did a lot of talking to people in the neighbourhood to make sure they shared our concerns,” she explained. “And talking to the councillor, the feeling is that if there was a consistent way of regulating the neighbourhood, the by-law officers would, with more ease, be able to actually ticket people and some of this, I would say taking advantage by DFATD, wouldn’t happen in the same way.”
“We just need more of a deterrent and I think by standardizing the number of hours you can park, it would make sense.”
Resnick, who is the member of the Lowertown Community Association (LCA) executive leading the parking-reform initiative in Lowertown, says the next step will be to formalize what the LCA hopes to achieve in a statement for submission to Ottawa City Council.
“His [Councillor Fleury’s] one idea is we either get a petition or he’ll just circulate it in mailboxes and as long as at least 50 percent of residents support it, then he’ll propose it to Council,” Resnick said. “This kind of thing has actually already been done in other parts of Lowertown with great success.”
There is speculation the City’s LRT expansion will help ease some of the burden, and indeed is part of a broader policy of building towards a greener, more sustainable future. However Councillor Fleury says the city is not using it as a direct tactic.