Park it

Parking management required

Before being elected in 2018 I didn’t think much about parking.

I’m one of those drivers who usually parks once and walks to get my tasks done. This means I don’t usually have trouble finding parking.

Early in my first term I started to hear that the parking is a nightmare downtown.

Parking challenges in other pockets of the community, notably at Sea and Sky, were then being reported from other residents.

It became clear that I needed to learn more about parking so I dove into it.

In addition to absorbing the parking reports prepared for Squamish Council I started digging into other sources of information on parking. Three sources stood out for me. The first is a book called The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup, followed by Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise and a podcast hosted by Paul Barter called Reinventing Parking.

From these thinkers who have spent a significant amount of time researching and studying parking I concluded what we have in Squamish is a parking management problem.

In my travels downtown I find parking in places that aren’t obvious and in those places there’s often a few available spots. The 55+ Activity Centre is a place I often attend for meetings and events. The garage parking spots below the centre are never even close to all occupied whenever I’ve been there.

Before construction started on Three Summits at the corner of Pemberton and Third Avenue I always found street parking in abundance beside and behind Shoppers Drug Mart.

The parking lots at Squamish Station and Chieftain Centre are rarely full. Same with the municipal lot off Loggers Lane between the rennie real estate office and the former Lotus Garden.

Currently, when council approves new developments, parking mandates are part of the development approval process. Developers have to provide a certain number of parking spots or request to make a cash contribution to the District of Squamish for each parking spot they won’t provide. And, council often allows visitor parking spaces to double as customer parking in mixed-use developments with commercial spaces at ground level.

This is all great and I think it’s working well. Thinking it works well isn’t good enough and the reason I think it’s working well is because we don’t have data to back this up either way.

Once Council approves developments with any amount of mandated parking there’s no follow up to determine the parking usage.

How are things working in the underground parking at Mistral and Sirocco? What about the parking at Jumar and Ashlu Apartments?

As far as I know, nobody is tracking and reporting parking availability at developments like these after they’re built.

What if that information was made available?

The data would be valuable and it would help us better understand the downtown parking situation. When is parking maxed out? When is parking available in abundance? What length of time are people generally leaving their vehicles parked downtown? Having the answers to these questions would be really helpful.

Grabar has many thoughts on ways to manage parking in places where drivers complain there isn’t enough parking.

“Abolish parking minimums and let developers build the amount of parking their clients want,” Grabar argues near the end of his book. “Break garage rents apart from apartment rents so carless tenants don’t have to subsidize their neighbours’ driving. Recognize that more parking means less housing, especially affordable housing. Let different uses – an office and an apartment building, a school and a movie theatre – share parking. Charge for the best street parking, and use parking prices and enforcement not to generate cash and cycles of punishment but to manage city streets.

“Invest the proceeds in the neighbourhood,” Grabar suggests. “Let architects design environments where people can walk. Ask drivers to bear some of the externalities of automobile use. And turn some of that extra parking into something new.”

Eight years into life as an elected official and I think about parking frequently, possibly too often. 

I created a video about active transportation and you can watch it by clicking on this link. A similar video related to parking in Squamish is currently in production.