The meter has long run out on the idea of pay parking in downtown Prince George.
The rest of the city has already been declared an unfettered parking lot, so to continue penalizing downtown businesses, their staff, and their customers is an idea that simply must be dropped like a bad penny.
City council is once again contemplating the idea of adding some kind of metering system to downtown's streets. There have been none for the past three years, and you will not notice a flood of public complaints about that.
The only argument being made in favour of the move is the cost of street enforcement. There is currently a time limit on how long you can park in one spot, but the fines for overstaying your vehicular welcome are not bringing in the same amount of money as the price of meter monitor staff.
It is ludicrous to pay one dime for parking enforcement staff at all. Cancel what's left of the program. Let all people park for free at all times. You will not see a sudden surge of cars because people are already fully engaged in downtown parking now with a shuffling of the deck every two hours. There are currently zero problems finding a suitable parking spot within reasonable distance to any downtown destination. Anyone who says there isn't enough downtown parking is shockingly lazy, if a couple of blocks can't be walked (due respect to those with mobility challenges, for whom more parking and access measures should be devoted).
The current team of meter monitors should be redeployed to an enforcement department that really can make the city's life better: bylaw services. Better enforcing the bylaws we have and strengthening the ones we could still use - especially pertaining to organized crime or degraded properties - will save money by curbing crime and it could perhaps even be an income source: hefty fines for nasty business.
Those are double-dollar revenues because they not only generate funds for the taxpayer, they also subtract social decay which costs us in harsher ways.
Understand also that those who'll carry the heaviest load of parking fees are not the customers or clients (although they won't like 'em). The ones who'll have to pay every day are the civil servants, the cafe servers, the store clerks, the staff of the banking and legal and medical sectors, the small business entrepreneurs all trying to earn a dollar while someone at City Hall tries to claw it back just for showing up to work their shift. So, the main stakeholders and supporters of your downtown economy are the ones getting punched in the pocket day after day and they won't fail to notice that there are no parking meters anywhere between downtown Prince George and (in each respective direction) Kamloops, Edmonton, Whitehorse and Ketchikan. So why there?
It would be perhaps a different story if there was a parking shortage like in Vancouver and Victoria but there is plenty of room here and you want as many stalls filled as possible, don't you? You also, as a local government, have done precious little to provide a transit system or meaningful residential housing for the downtown, each reducing the need for cars there.
Looking at the plan's bottom line - council has to have a pretty cloudy calculator to think that fronting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in new metering hardware and technology will somehow be worth the relative pittance it would generate. At its best, the downtown parking program was generating only about $220,000 a year of which only $80,000 was direct profit, minus the depreciation on the hardware (the meters, now gone) and other indirect costs.
Furthermore, if local government did make a lot of money out of parking fines, shame on you for gouging.
And if parking fees are a factor in even one store subtracted from the downtown economy, that more than erases any financial gains the city might wish to realize with this civic panhandling scheme.
It is insulting enough that Northern Health drives up their revenues off the sick, the concerned, and the grieving at the hospital parking lot. It is dodgy enough that UNBC and CNC rev up their bottom line on the backs of students and supporters already struggling to better themselves and society. Now City Hall wants to drop a dime on the very sector of town they most want to invigorate? It's a notion that should be run off the road completely.
-- The Prince George Citizen
