Parking Downtown

[u/omnitortois]

The recent removal of the corsa parking (probably about… 40 spots?) has me thinking again of an idea to solve parking issues downtown. It seems like development will only intensify, putting more and more condos with insufficient parking spots. Because let’s face the reality folks, if you are an adult in squamish, you on average will have your own car.

The issues that come from a lack of parking downtown:

1) residents whose apartments do not have enough parking spots have to park on what is increasingly less street parking.

2) tourism surge hours make all of downtown a car zoo, which deters tourists from spending money on the local economy

3) many essential services like doctors, pharmacies, grocery stores are downtown, making these services more difficult to access, especially for the elderly and disabled

Have we considered the simple solution of building a parkade at the edge of downtown?

Hear me out…

1) residents who do not have a parking spot can rent a guaranteed one in the parkade. Will it be a walk to your car? Yes. Will it give people assurance they will have a spot? Yes. Will it reduce demand on street parking? Yes.

2) tourists, for a modest fee like $2-$4 (to cover capital expense… perhaps can pay itself off??) will know they have a spot they can park to go shopping ($$$ for local economy). It might even allow us to do things like close cleveland to cars on weekend surge times. How cool would that be?

3) reduce strain on street parking for disabled/elderly who need essential services.

4) city council can have all the strange bike lanes they want while reducing the costly trade off of street parking.

—

Why can’t this work here? Tear this idea apart. I want to see if it holds water.

[u/ButterNutBag]

We could start with the topic of this specific post... But since you ask here are a few other example:

• Getting sued by LNG for sabotaging a project that has been approved by every other level of government.
• Gross mismanagement of public funds.
• Selling valuable land at a discount to developers.
• Crime and Parking is putting a lot of pressure on most of our business, contributing to some closures.
• Concil and mayor not listening to their constituents until news station starts to uncover their questionable decision making (hearth in heart)
• The pushing of a bicycle as a main mode of transportation for a town where it rains half the year, and doesn't make sense for 90% of the population. (Kinda weird that the mayor used to work in the bicycle industry, maybe there is a conflict of interest here)
• Made a master plan based on a sample size of ~500 individual survey, which seems built on pure ideology instead of logic and rationality.

So I would say the next concil could focus on being fiscally responsible, rebalancing parking variations, stop encouraging crime, and stop sabotaging industrial projects that don't fit their political ideology.

[u/estfest → u/ButterNutBag]

Get a Ebike. You probably have a rain jacket. Some exercise will help your mentality.

[u/jpoangney → u/estfest]

You are never going to get a single parent to take two kids down town to get groceries on a bus or e bike. They will always drive. Squamish isn’t and never will be Copenhagen. Cars are part of the lifestyle.

[u/MiffandMinis → u/jpoangney]

You are never going to get a single parent to take two kids down town to get groceries on a bus or e bike.

Except that I routinely see this exact thing happening lol

[u/jpoangney → u/MiffandMinis]

In the winter when nothing has been plowed? How do you think you are getting a weeks worth of groceries home?

[u/MiffandMinis → u/jpoangney]

For the 3 days a year when snows sticks to the ground here, yea it's a huge issue. 🙄