Cars in the city core

I wonder if the city’s senior planning staff has any real experience with downtown neighbourhood parking. If not, I invite them to come and spend a week angling for street parking in my neighbourhood, which includes both Chinatown and Little Italy. During Winterlude, the Tulip Festival, Bluesfest and Festival Italiano, cars circle the block over and over, looking for street parking. Weekdays at lunchtime are just as bad. We put up with cars hanging over our laneways, cars double-parked and even perfect strangers repeatedly using our driveways and parking spaces without asking.

There is a mountain of evidence indicating pressure on existing street parking throughout the downtown core. The city’s solution? Discourage those living in the downtown core from owning cars. Councillor Diane Holmes is to be applauded for her more considered response, which recognizes the fact that people will drive and need a place to park. The city is seeking to over-intensify the core, which contravenes a perfectly good Official Plan. However, instead of considering the traffic and parking pressures that over-intensification brings, the city wants to ban cars in the core. No cars, no problem.

I wonder why it should be a luxury to own a car in the city core — where people have been allowed carriages and cars for more than 150 years — while remaining a right if you live anywhere else. In the core, we already pay more for less house and less land. We pay higher taxes. We fund new suburban infrastructure, even though our own infrastructure is long paid for. We live with more noise and more crime. We get “landmark” skyscrapers stuck on minuscule plots of land.

Perhaps a more appropriate solution would be to penalize those who drive to trendy downtown neighbourhoods for gelato and dim sum — rather than those who maintain those neighbourhoods by actually living in them.

SHEILA SINGHAL, Ottawa