West End residents take an extra five minutes and travel an additional kilometre to find parking in their neighbourhood. Visitors spend 10 minutes and drive an additional three kilometres, according to the City of Vancouver.
Finding parking in the densely populated West End is a well-known challenge, but now the city is considering ways of managing it and staff are seeking public feedback on various options through a survey.
The city’s stated aim is to make parking easier while “discouraging more driving, considering the impacts to overall affordability and reducing inconvenience, congestion, pollution and safety risks.”
Vision Coun. Tim Stevenson, who’s lived in the West End for 20 years, acknowledges it’s a problem.
“It’s frustrating for many people unless you have a spot like mine that you pay for in a building,” he said.
“But the thing is there are hundreds of [unused] spots in buildings already, so how do we make that accessible and how do we let people know that’s possible? Is there a way to work with any of these landlords to put some of these [spots] aside?”
City statistics underscore that point — there are 16,000 cars registered in the area, about 22,000 off-street residential spaces and about 2,700 on-street residential spaces. If every car parked in off-street spaces, parking would only be three quarters full.
There are more than 6,000 active West End parking permits at any given time, according to the city, for the 2,700 on-street spaces. The permits are priced at $6 a month, which is lower than some other cities such as Toronto which charges $15 to $52 a month depending on whether the permit holder has access to off-street spaces.
Stevenson suspects many survey respondents may not want to see a parking permit price increase or they’d want a graduation of fees based on factors such as income or age considering the West End is becoming increasingly expensive to live in.
“Rent wise, the West End is becoming less affordable so we don’t want to add to that burden. So again, how do we measure that and how do we find a way that isn’t even more of a burden for those people who are already struggling,” he said.
Long-time West End resident Brent Granby, a former member of the now defunct West End Residents’ Association, also calls parking a hassle.
“This is the first time that engineering has really attempted to do a comprehensive study, so I’m impressed that they did that work. It’s something we were always advocating for them to do,” he said.
Granby agrees it’s important to look at underground parking capacity.
“I think one of the things they’re looking at is, in effect, the city is underwriting the price of the parking on streets while there’s so much underground capacity that’s not utilized,” he said.
The city didn’t have anyone available for an interview but emailed a statement attributed to Eric Mital, the city’s manager of neighbourhood parking and transportation.
It indicated that the survey is in response to directions in both Transportation 2040 and the more recently approved West End Community Plan.
Transportation 2040 calls for staff to develop better on-street parking management in neighbourhoods, and the West End Plan cites parking as a significant issue to be reviewed.
“At this point staff are not proposing solutions — instead, we are asking for feedback on a number of tools and approaches that we’ve learned about through our research and that we think may be helpful in the West End. We’re also asking for new ideas and collecting more data to help inform the development of solutions/recommendations. We’re planning to come back to the neighbourhood with the results of this survey and a more developed set of recommendations in the New Year,” the email stated.
The survey is available online with responses accepted until Nov. 30.
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