For what it's worth, I hate to pay for parking. I also hate buying gas but that's another issue.
When I was a student at UNBC I had a car in my first year so I drove to school and in my first semester, I bought a parking pass for around $130.
During my second semester, I never got around to buying a parking pass, nor did I often plug the meter with change due to the fact that I forget to plan ahead for things like parking.
That second semester, I made a habit of parking as close to the school as possible with the idea that the parking attendants would first check the cars at the very back of the parking lot to get the other,
less-obvious, parking fraudsters.
Though I cheated the system, I was exceptionally pleased to have saved half of what a parking pass would have been.
Sure, I got caught a few times and yes, the tickets were expensive. From what I remember, the tickets that I got were worth about half of the cost of a parking pass. Good deal right?
With the potential return to paid parking in the downtown core, I'm not looking forward to the constant rush of trying to find a parking spot close to the store that I want to shop in and then trying to find change to pay for what could potentially be twenty minutes of window shopping.
As I've mentioned before, I've worked in retail in downtown Prince George and downtown Victoria and at the times that I worked there, both cities had paid parking.
The city of Victoria had contracted most of the available spaces in small parking lots to Robbins Parking (outrageously expensive) and the street parking was always filled and you needed at least a toonie for an hour of shopping.
When I worked downtown Prince George, you could still put a nickel in the machine and shop for an hour.
In both cities, the shoppers who got tickets were mad. I've seen people in both cities yell at the parking attendants; in both cities, nighttime drunks would do their best to either smash the machines or vault over them in a fit of drunken athletic marvel.
Do I think that paid parking downtown is a good idea? Not really.
I understand the need for traffic control and for having additional sources of revenue for the city. Even in a city like Victoria, the paid parking downtown was a deterrent for local shoppers.
We should be doing everything we can to encourage tourism, shopping and a vibrant downtown - not gouging the locals of their coffee change.
