City to remove Yaletown angled parking spaces
There are about 200 parking spots in the five central Yaletown blocks of Mainland and Hamilton streets.
If the City of Vancouver has its way, half of those will be gone at the beginning of March. The rationale: the city’s fire trucks need more room to manoeuvre.
Vancouver Fire and Rescue Service spokesman Capt. Jonathan Gormick said it’s a matter of safety.
“This has been identified as a problem for quite some time,” he said. “The parking has to change, period.”
The plan is to take out all the angled stall parking on the west side of the streets, leaving parallel parking spots on the east side.
The fire truck problem is acknowledged by the Yaletown Business Improvement Association, but BIA officials say they were blindsided by the decision and also disagree with the solution.
“We understand the need for the fire access,” Yaletown BIA executive director Annette O’Shea said.
But there was no sign this was coming, O’Shea said, even though she’s come to understand city engineers had been looking at the problem for six months.
“We were literally caught off guard with, ‘Hi, the parking is not working in the busiest parking area in the entire city. We’re going to remove it.’
“The city normally does outreach and talks to us. We’re on the street, we understand how the street is used.”
Paul Storer, the city’s manager of transportation design, said the BIA was first told of the coming changes in December; they then met with a “bigger group” Jan. 11.
There are just over 200 spots in the affected area, O’Shea said. Half of those will be removed.
“These stalls have a 92 per cent use rate,” she said. “Each gets used seven times per day.”
The BIA and others met with city engineers and the fire department and suggested the parallel parking be removed instead, which works out to about 40 spots.
Gormick said that proposal just doesn’t work.
“I’ve looked at the diagrams. I know how much room we need,” he said. “It’s not possible to do with (keeping) angled parking.”
The Yaletown fire hall responds to more than 500 calls a month, and the department expects that number to increase as the area continues to densify.
O’Shea worries what removing the parking will do to the many businesses that line the five blocks.
“This city has no history having success in removing parking from a commercial district,” she said.
The city will hold a public consultation Feb. 22 to determine what alterations can be made to surrounding streets that might help alleviate the changes on Hamilton and Mainland.