City committee OK’s conditional angle parking in cul-de-sacs
More than a year after city council first tried to change the rules to allow for legal angle parking in culde-sacs, councillors on Thursday pushed forward a proposal that could finally alleviate a chronic suburban headache.
Council’s transportation committee voted Thursday in favour of a policy that would allow residents to formally request angle parking be permitted in their cul-de-sac based on a number of factors, including the configuration of driveways and accessibility for emergency vehicles and garbage trucks.
City officials would evaluate each application — which would require a successful petition of neighbours with at least 80 per cent support — on a case-by-case basis.
Though councillors and city officials readily acknowledge that “nose-in” parking happens regularly in cul-de-sacs across the city, it’s technically illegal according to provincial law unless otherwise posted.
“People have been (angle) parking in cul-de-sacs for decades,” Coun. Shane Keating said Thursday. “Probably as soon as they were first built they were angle parking. And all of a sudden, because we had disputes, then there was a problem.”
A blitz of ticketing in cul-de-sacs by the Calgary Parking Authority in 2016 helped push the issue to the forefront, with several residents coming forward to the media to complain that they had no idea that their usual parking habits were against the law.
Keating said he believes the heightened attention around the issue also helped fuel disputes between neighbours.
“For a while there, if neighbours got into a dispute, then one of them would phone in and say ‘so-and-so is angle parking in a cul-de-sac and that’s illegal,’” Keating said.
“We did have a flurry of residents phoning in and complaining, and then the parking authority would go out and give tickets. It was more of a dispute rather than a real problem but, at the same time, it had to be addressed because it is on the books as being against the law.”
Under the proposed policy, if an application is approved, residents would be on the hook for the costs associated with planning and installing the angle parking — an amount the city estimates would be a little over $2,300.
Part of the city’s plan would include a six-month pilot project to implement a warnings-first approach for violations reported to the parking authority.
Currently, the parking authority does not actively patrol cul-de-sacs but does respond to complaints. The parking authority responded to 249 calls for parking complaints in cul-de-sacs in 2017, resulting in 72 tickets for illegal angle parking.
There are around 2,500 cul-desacs in the city of Calgary.
Coun. Jyoti Gondek said a lot of trouble could be avoided if neighbours would simply talk to each other.
“Let’s get back to the days of when you actually had a conversation with your neighbour and figured out what worked and what didn’t, instead of calling some sort of authority to issue tickets,” Gondek said.