North Shore parking war heats up

The grace period is over in one of the most hotly contested parking turf wars in Deep Cove.

The District of North Vancouver is set to start ticketing illegally parked vehicles on Panorama Drive, which has been the site of a struggle between Baden Powell hikers, the street’s residents and commuters who park near the marina before heading to their homes across the water.

The District of North Vancouver instituted “residents only” parking on Panorama Drive at the outset of summer, handing out 34 warnings to wayward drivers during the road’s busiest months.

“We will start enforcement next week,” said the district’s engineering general manager Gavin Joyce. “We’ve given everybody fair warning.”

Parking problems on the block came to the district’s attention when Panorama residents complained that the congestion constituted a safety hazard for emergency vehicles.

In a column for the Deep Cove Crier earlier this year, Mayor Richard Walton noted the crowd in Deep Cove is “akin to the scene in a large shopping mall parking lot two days before Christmas.”

They let people build homes, but they never bothered to build a road.

GIOVANNA BONIFACE

INDIAN ARM RESIDENT

Long-term residents were often reluctant to leave their homes on sunny days out of fear they would need to park a kilometre away on returning, according to Walton.

The situation has been exacerbated by the growing popularity of the Baden Powell Trail.

The district has issued two residents’ only passes and one visitor’s pass to Panorama Drive’s denizens. Indian Arm residents were issued one visitor’s pass, which didn’t sit well with Indian Arm resident Giovanna Boniface.

“The marina is like our driveway,” she said. “I feel that we’re being discriminated against by being labelled a visitor.”

Boniface pays $2,000 a year for marina parking, but said new stalls at the marina are few and far between.

Many of the families in Indian Arm consider themselves Deep Cove residents, according to Boniface.

“Everything we do is in the Cove,” she said. “The only difference is that we live 1.8 kilometres north of everybody else and the district never put a road in. They let people build homes, but they never bothered to build a road.”

There is no inherent right to use public facilities to park, according to Coun. Roger Bassam, who addressed the issue at a committee meeting Monday. “I don’t know why government has to be the provider of every solution to every minor crisis,” he said.

Car shares or residents renting out driveways could help alleviate the problem, according to Bassam.

During the jockeying for spots some residents have erected suspect No Parking signs, according to Coun. Mike Little. “These are not District of North Vancouver-issued signs,” he said. “They’re being defended by the neighbours and yelling at people.”

Deep Cove’s status as an international destination has added to the bottleneck, according to Coun. Doug MacKay-Dunn.

“Deep Cove grew organically, unfettered by planning,” he said. “As the price of homes went up most of them got suites, some of them got, shall we say, authorized suites and more and more cars started showing up.”

The situation isn’t sustainable, said MacKay-Dunn.