Ready to pay for residential parking?

While paying on residential streets is unusual, it does strike needed balance

Who owns Edmonton’s residential streets?

Most of us don’t give the question too much thought. It’s easier just to assume that the spaces in front of our house somehow “belong” to us by some kind of automotive droit de seigneur. When strangers park in “our” parking spaces, Edmontonians tend to throw territorial tantrums.

It can be hard to hear. But we don’t actually have any kind of claim to the bits of road outside our homes. They belong to the city, not to us, and generally speaking, anybody is free to park there.

Which leads to this provocative question. Should the city start charging people to park on certain residential side streets? Should it use its new parking machine technology to turn some residential roads into metered parking zones?

That’s the suggestion made this week by Ward 6 councillor Scott McKeen.

It’s all a side-effect of a recommendation from city council’s executive committee. The committee is endorsing a pilot project for three of Edmonton’s busiest commercial districts — Whyte Avenue, West Jasper Avenue and 124th Street — which would excuse new restaurants and bars from the city’s long-standing parking rules.

Under the current rules, a new restaurant on 124th Street is supposed to provide 50 parking spots for customers, while a new restaurant on east or west ends of Whyte Avenue — outside the historic Old Strathcona core — is supposed to provide 28.

In reality, almost no one complies with the rules, which are clearly outmoded in a modern urban streetscape. About the only way a new restaurant on 124th Street could include 50 parking spots would be to buy and bulldoze the building next door or dig an underground parkade. A recent city report determined that just 26 per cent of food establishments on 124th Street, Whyte or West Jasper Avenue, were actually in compliance with city parking rules.

The rest, it seems, were granted variances or grandfathered in. So, with what seems to me to be great common sense, council is considering scrapping the rules, on a trial basis at least, and allowing businesses in those three areas to provide just a handful of parking spots instead. What, after all, is the point of keeping a rule that discourages new businesses, adds needless paperwork and misery for small business owners, and which isn’t even observed three-quarters of the time?

McKeen supports the change. But he’s also concerned about the number of customers and staff members who routinely use nearby residential streets for free parking. “This is Edmonton. We still need parking,” he says. “But no residential street should be used as an employee parking lot. That is unfair to residential neighbourhoods.”

So McKeen is proposing that the city install some of its new E-Park parking machines on particularly busy residential streets, in neighbourhoods such as Oliver, Westmount and Strathcona. Parking, he suggests, should be for a maximum of two hours, to encourage customer turnover. People who live on the street wouldn’t have to pay, he says, but their visitors would.

There are already limits to that laissez-faire parking freedom. In certain neighbourhoods — Garneau, near the University of Alberta campus, or McCauley, near Commonwealth Stadium — there are already strict restrictions on parking for non-residents or places where you can’t park for more than two hours.

Still, it would be a big psychological leap for Edmontonians to wrap their heads around. McKeen knows many people would blast the city for moneygrubbing. But to ease the pain, McKeen suggests parking money collected in a residential community might be earmarked for local community improvements.

McKeen’s idea is just that at the moment — an idea, one that city parking planners are just starting to kick around. But it’s a smart idea, one we should definitely start discussing. We want areas like West Jasper Ave and 124th Street to succeed, and to do that, we need vibrant businesses and places for customers to park. But we also can’t swamp and overwhelm the surrounding residential neighbourhoods which gives those shopping districts so much of their distinctive charm. We need to strike a balance. And yes, that may mean we’ll have to start paying for road parking we’ve already expected to be free. And we’re not going to like it. But it may be the best way to ration finite parking spots fairly for everyone.

“There will always be pressure for parking in those areas,” McKeen says. “and I don’t know how to allocate those spaces except by paying.”