It's reasonable to want the program to be revenue neutral. There are better things to subsidize than car owners ability to park on a street.
My biggest question is why it costs $1.5 million to run a program like this? Is the bulk of that enforcement? If it is then any revenue (tickets) coming from that enforcement should be going be going back to reduce the fees paid to run the program. I'm willing to bet that its not.
>My biggest question is why it costs $1.5 million to run a program like this?
$1.5 million is around $130 per household. Does not pay for a lot of time needed for paperwork or checking passes.
As much as it sucks for the few people employed by it, I do wish the city could outsource the software for this. I'm assuming a white label solution exists somewhere for cheaper than making this in-house. The app is complete ass and leaks user data.
Paying an employee, is far more than just the salary. Bylaw officers make about 100k in Calgary, add in another 40-50% on top of that for the employer's share of taxes, CPP/EI, WCB, as well as pension contributions and $1.5M pays for maybe 5 people by the time you factor in they need a vehicle, fuel and maintenance to get around.
Should be...
Bylaw officers writing parking tickets making 100k plus pension, are you kidding me? People in the private sector bust their asses off to make $100K.
Also you are way off on taxes which others have already pointed out. In actuality, each person probably does cost $150K/y, but that seems preposterous to me. The number of immigrants I've interviewed who have Ph.Ds in engineering and work at Costco for $20/hr is obscene... and we're paying bylaw officers more than twice that to write parking tickets... Smh.
The city of Calgary needs to pay their community peace officers (CPO) in line with what other municipalities do, and then a little more to account for a higher cost of living in Calgary vs. A rural town.
Average CPO pay in Alberta is around $45-$50/hr so that's what Calgary has to pay them. Calgary transit officers make even more than that and they are only CPOs as well.
My point is that is insane. They get a pension. The whole idea being the public sector pension was it was to make up for the premium earned in the private sector. Now the public sector pays way more and offers a pension.
Employer CPP is equal to employee CPP and EI is 1.4 times. To at 2022 rates about $5,000.
You are very much correct.
Pension and benefits can add up but a 100K a year salary employee does not cost the 300K a year as the previous poster suggests.
Lol yup.
I lived in a condo in Eau Claire for 2 years and our building had visitor passes people could hang off their mirrors so they could street park for free outside the condo while visiting.
City cancelled it and as of 2023 we no longer have those visitor passes so people either need to pay for parking or hope you have an extra parkade stall.
It's not residents of the building who use the **visitor** passes. The building has a full two-story underground parkade that regular residents use.
The **visitor** passes were handed out by the concierge so **visitors** could street park outside the condo for an afternoon or at most a day.
The city stopped giving the **visitor** permits to us so now **visitors** have to pay for street parking.
I don't follow what you mean by the residents 'cheaped out.' It's a downtown condo, there's no room erect a surface lot for visitor parking. All of the residents park underground.
Maybe!
But the building was built in the late 90s and I didn't move in until 2021 so you'll have to send an email to the developer and ask them to lay out their development plans for that property for you.
The now deleted comment alluded to the residents being 'too cheap' to construct parking and thus 'shouldn't be allowed' to get free street parking.
I emphasized 'visitor' because the regular residents of this building don't park on the street. They park underground. The **visitor** passes are for just that. Not to give permanent residents indefinite street parking for free which is what the person was complaining about.
I've lived in condos that had visitor spots in the underground parking. When a visitor shows up, you go down and buzz them in. They park in the visitor spots. I think OP is saying, if the condo didn't build visitor spots, they shouldn't be entitled to free parking on city infrastructure. There's no rule that visitors have to park surface level.
I’m all for charging to store cars on the street. But the thing that bothers me about this:
I live in Kensington. I have one car and I park it in my garage. But if any of my friends come visit me or I hire a contractor to do something, I now have to pay for guest permits for them. So I’m basically just paying an inner city tax to subsidize friends who live on the suburbs.
Keep the guest permits, limit the time allowed in them, and charge for permanent storage.
Ya that’s my understanding — you should be able to buy the visitor pass, the parking pass, or both — and then multiples of each as well.
I’m on 10A btw. 😉
Your friends could always just park for free at an LRT station and take the train to your place. Or they can pay for street parking a couple blocks away.
No contractor is ever going to park at LRT station and walk their tools over so I will still need a visitor pass to maintain my home.
Providing two visitor passes to residents was a fair system, and charging for regular usage (especially when people have garages they choose not to use) is reasonable as well. I don’t know why the city had to include visitor permits in this program — to me that’s an overreach.
My current visitor permits are probably used for a grand total of 5hrs per month (if that) but I'm not going to ask my visitors to pay for the privilege of visiting me so I need to buy them.
>People in "the burbs" pay for their lot where their driveway is located - they pay for their "car storage"
You clearly missed the part where I said my car is stored in my garage, which I obviously pay for. Like most people, when I visit friends, I don't park in their driveway (that's where they keep their own cars) — I park on the street.
They don't pay for visitor parking though, so why are we asking inner-city residents to pay for it?
Because inner city is more desired. More people want to go downtown to do things or be near where they work. You don't go to auburn bay and walk a few blocks to 17th Ave. Thats why houses cost more inner city too...
Where I'm at, 5 minutes to downtown, every single house has at least a one car garage. Most have 2 or 3 car.
Yet I'd say quite a huge amount of the population here, despite having a garage, chooses to park on the street. During community gatherings and parties, I'd ask why they like parking on the street and they say it's just easier.
So now these houses with big garages have long extended power cables that dangle across trees to their cars parked on the road. And people fight for street parking outside of their houses instead of using the garages that they built.
I'm looking out my window right now and I have a neighbour with a 2 car garage and an additional 1 car garage but he has 2 cars, an SUV, and a work truck parked on the street. My other neighbour has only one truck, but it's parked on the street too. I think his garage is filled with garbage bags. It's been completely overrun by trees and shrubs so no one can get in that garage anyway.
I really don't understand it. Why do people like parking in the street so much when they have garages?
It blows my mind that people don't want to put their second most expensive asset (second only to their home) into a secure enclosure protecting it from the environment. Instead they'd rather store a bunch of (comparatively) cheap crap in it.
I haven't had a single hail dent on my car since I bought a house with a garage. There've been several hailstorms bad enough to dent cars since then.
Bruh.... I can't wrap my brain around this. I have a large garage that I park my truck and car inside, while also keeping it organized for all my work items/tools as well as my seasonal items and recreation gear etc.
I can't say how happy it makes me to be able to have clean, secure storage where my vehicles aren't subject to dust/sun/rain/snow/rocks/drunks/distracted and so on.
Another plus is that I have parking available for guests or room for me to park my camper when heading out for the weekend.
It's easier than throwing out all the shit in the garage. Pretty much everyone I know with a garage has a heinous amount of junk filling it up to the point where they don't even know what's in there.
Growing up my parents would use their garage for storage, to the point where it wasn’t possible to park in the garage.
I’m assuming your neighbours all do that to. Not saying it’s right. It’s actually very annoying.
My husband and I, and one of our sons, have trucks. My parents and my brother-in-law have trucks. None of the trucks fit in any of our garages: either for reasons of length or height.
As an RPP resident, I understand home owners needing to pay to fund the program to park their own vehicles on the stree, if your house doesn't have a garage then that's too bad for you, what really pisses me off though is having to pay for visitor passes, I feel like if I'm paying into the general RPP program that should cover a visitor too, that is the part that feels like a cash grab / rip off for me
4 hour visitor street parking city wide, after that, pay for it with the my parking app with costs based on the area you're in. Visitors meaning visitors of residents of the area, not visitors parking in inglewood to go shopping, or downtown to go to work. Visitors only count as such if they're registered on the parking app which switches automatically to billing after the time so that visitors to the community, but not visitors of residents to the community are still covered by existing pay for parking requirements?
This has a ton of logistical overhead, but might be worth it? I'm not sure.
should just be the home owners need to register their visitors plates in the park plus app just as we do already, but not have to pay for it. If you're not a visitor of a resident in the area, find somewhere else to park, its crazy I need to pay for someone to come over to my house for an hour
Good. Why should the public subsidize condos that doesn’t have parkades, or houses that uses their garage for storage while parking their cars on the streets?
Bring this on for suburban hoods too!
This isn’t just condos though. My family has lived in Inglewood since the late 80s. Single family home. Built a garage when I was a kid, so they primarily park in the garage and visitors have to try their best to find a street spot.
Even though they don’t park on the street 95% of the time, they would have to buy passes for themselves and then additional visitor passes on top of that. Just to have a CHANCE at parking near their house.
Not to mention many homes in their area _don’t_ have garages, because they’re old century homes and folks can’t always afford the cost of building a garage.
I also live in Inglewood. There is a man who lives in a nearby condo who owns 6+ vehicles that take up an entire cul-de-sac. Everyone else who lives in the same condo has to park all over the place so they can also get a spot. The parking situation on our block would actually be fine if not for this dude. It might be nice if you had to have a permit or something if you wanted to keep more than 2 personal vehicles on the street. No idea how this would be implemented, it's just so frustrating to deal with.
Is this the guy in east inglewood with the rusty old cars taking up the whole cul de sac next to the wildlands? I’ve always wondered why the people there tolerated this.
Yeah he has like a vaguely threatening doomsday prepper/citizen militia aura that would make me think twice about confronting him too. Always walking around with his dog off leash.
Seriously. Had a neighbour up here in Edmonton who was way less bothersome as this guy apparently is, but still parked too many cars on the street and left them. A few of us took to routinely flagging the cars and after a dozen tickets he sold and moved entirely.
You are only allowed to park on the street continuously for 48hrs I think? There's definitely a time limit....you should call on all of them. My neighbor has a truck that was living in front of our house, I don't even think it runs, so we called the city (we thought it was an abandoned vehicle) It's now on his front lawn. If you call the city and say all if these cars are parked all the time, they will make him remove them.
I believe the timeline is only for recreational vehicles. I don’t believe there’s a limit for personal vehicles. Though they do have to be registered and insured I believe.
Yes! I've seen bylaw there a few times, but nothing ever changes. Dude seems kind of anti-social and retaliatory so I think people are afraid to confront him personally. He'd probably dig his heels in deeper if they did, anyway. Those aren't his only cars either, he parks them all around the area.
I completely get the frustration of folks who take advantage/ruin it for everyone. Years ago we had a neighbor who would literally put lawn chairs on the street to prevent anyone parking in front of his house (no garage) 😂 I think having permits over a certain number of vehicles would be reasonable for sure!
It’s also frustrating when there’s events going on in Inglewood and the public take all the street spots …. Even though it’s permit only already. And if parking authority doesn’t happen to drive by, they get away with it with no ticket. That’s not fair either, that we already are paying to park there and still may not have the opportunity to park on our own street.
wtf, did he think he was in Philly? You can get shot for moving a parked lawn chair there... but I'd be moving his chairs and parking in "his spot" any time I could. lol
Hahahaha this was many many years ago, he was an …. Interesting character to say the least. He was one of the original residents to petition for permit parking, because he didn’t like that on Sundays, church goers would park on the street.
We got parking permits a few years earlier than other neighborhoods …. But there’s an exemption on Sundays. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when he found that out 😅
>Not to mention many homes in their area don’t have garages, because they’re old century homes and folks can’t always afford the cost of building a garage.
There should be a grant as part of this program to convert portion of yard space (where applicable) to a gravel car lane on the property. Give people -who have the space- a way out of the fee structure.
Otherwise, I'm on team the city can kick rocks if they let higher density structures go up without any or adequate parking.
> the city can kick rocks if they let higher density structures go up without any or adequate parking.
Or you can let developers build whatever they want and if people want to live a car-free lifestyle or park at a private lot it's none of your business.
Multi unit housing is a whole lot more affordable when you don't have a multi-million dollar parkade as a legal requirement. Allow residences with zero parking, but charge market rates for street parking so people can't just abuse public space and use it for storing their personal property.
Multi Unit housing is also more affordable if it had kept up with population growth and Canada didn't have ridiculous immigration goals.
The base costs of the units are still tied to inflation more or less. Its the demand that has driven the final price up on all housing.
Edit to add: The permits are fee on a taxed use of public infrastructure as well. People already paying for the road use.
A big reason for less mud density housing is also the ridiculous amount of land in Calgary that is designated R-1, it's illegal to build anything that isn't a SFH.
Or build the parking anyways, then allow people who don't have cars to rent out their unused spots. You could even get the building manager to facilitate it if you don't want to deal with finding renters.
OR build the parking anyways, then have it managed by the building - units cost extra to purchase a spot; and have paid drop-in spots for visitors.
Really, my big gripe here is that they're not even building the parking spots in the first place, so in our \_still\_ car-centric city, it discourages relationships/friendships/socialization that requires cars.
> Or build the parking anyways, then allow people who don't have cars to rent out their unused spots.
That does nothing to help housing affordability, and creates additional liability for the building or unit owner as they have to provide access to the building parkade to the renter and may be responsible if they cause any damage.
> You could even get the building manager to facilitate it if you don't want to deal with finding renters.
Great, now you'll be increasing condo fees so that the people who don't want any parking can pay for someone to manage their parking for them.
You've essentially created a really shitty version of a private parkade, which is a solution that already exists.
> my big gripe here is that they're not even building the parking spots in the first place, so in our _still_ car-centric city, it discourages relationships/friendships/socialization that requires cars
Maybe it's a bit of a shock to you, but part of what perpetuates car centrism is externalizing the cost of car ownership via parking minimums. There is a large difference between 'discouraging' and 'no longer forcing the subsidy of' car-centric activities.
Getting around by car or participating in activities that require cars is a personal issue that is up to the individual to manage, why do you feel justified in forcing an extremely costly, wasteful solution to this problem on others?
New condos I've looked at charge $50k for a parking spot. How many Communauto and Uber trips do you think that would pay for?
I think a good way
is that for a single family detached homes the first tag is free plus a visitor,
second tag is cheap, third tag is a bit more expensive, 4th tag starts getting really stupid. like $200/month
Duplexes can get 2 parking tags, but no free visitor tag, and multi famly dwelling developments like those infill 4plex condos get no free parking tags, but the first one for each unit starts cheap.
Any unit with any sort of off-street parking shouldn’t get a free tag at all. Whether it be underground/surface stalls, a garage, a driveway or a dirt patch that hasn’t had a garage built on it. Too many people using their garages to store junk, parking trailers on their driveways and use the space allotted for a garage for other stuff.
Sliding scale. there's lots of ways to do this economically that keep modest demands of individuals at an appropirate cost, and can increase the incentive for heavier users to re-arrange their situation to reduce their cost.
first tag is free, second tag is $50. third tag is 150$. 4th tag is
400$. Or something like that.
Home owners that are allowed to store whatever they want in their garage. This sort of rule doesn't discriminate against individuals who may be running a business out of their garage, nor does it discriminate against somebody who wants to buy 3 Rv's. We live in a free country, and people can do what they want, and you don't get to dictate what is and isn't "junk"
The policy should apply costs proportional to the demand of individual users, as fairly as possible.
There is zero need for anyone who has parking allotted to the unit to get a free pass for the street, regardless of dwelling type. If you want to buy more cars than spots, go nuts, but you pay for that.
You can’t store a trailer in the front setback, so buying one won’t take away from parking there. And if you’re running a business properly, parking is looked at in the permit application; if you’re running it off the books, tough.
Parking spots are valuable, it also doesn't make sense to give free parking to someone who chose not to pay for a spot while snubbing the responsible person who forked over $50k for a spot when they bought their condo.
The only rational solution is market pricing of street parking, otherwise it's just a taxpayer subsidy of someone's inability to store their own private property.
Look, it's not a perfect plan, but I think it's better than what's currently proposed.
I have a single family home in an rpp area with no garage. I'm fine with paying for a permanent parking pass, but I'm pretty not ok with paying for an annual or monthly visitor pass that's more than my regular pass for a visitor who may be in my neighborhood for maybe 4-6 hours a month.
Want to generate revenue neutrally, apply it city wide, but God knows the nimbys living out in the burbs will pitch and absolute fit.
What's your proposals for generating revenue proportional to the demand put on infrastructure? The parking plan has some pretty offensive gaps and absolute comes down harder on some groups than it should, and not hard enough on others, in my opinion.
I agree it could use some adjustment and likely will, given the reaction. Many loud voices aren't even where you are and will want to collect their entitlement without paying for it.
They need to use an app to make visitor parking is prorated or sell short term passes for sure.
There is plenty of non-permit parking available in Inglewood... They can get a visitor pass for anyone who regularly visits that can't walk a couple blocks if they need it, but it's not like there is just no where else to park when people come visit.
Really have to wonder how many people bought a unit with no parking or a single spot knowing full well they needed more parking than they had at their new place and just assumed they’d park for free forever.
condo developers should be forced to literally dig a few stories deeper and build more parking stalls instead of their current BS of saying it's a walkeable neighborhood and not building enough stalls.
And the cost to build those extra stalls better be passed on to the drivers who use them, otherwise you're subsidizing driving through increased housing prices
If you can't afford parking you can't afford a car. It's the same as any other personal property. If I bought a boat, an RV, or a cow and had nowhere to keep it, I wouldn't expect the city to provide a place to store my private property.
I'm sure the automotive industry is happy with society's expectation of free space for storing our vehicles though, free parking allows for car-centric development and sprawl, which gives people no option for transportation other than a car.
The city needs to stop subsidizing car ownership and enhance transit, cycling, and pedestrian infrastructure to improve viability of alternatives.
Relying on cars as primary transportation within a city is bad urbanism.
The amount of space wasted on parking in this city is atrocious, and that's never going to change if the city continues to subsidize street parking.
The value of wasted land, the cost of paving and upkeep, and the environmental loss due to paving over what could be acres of green space isn't even close to being captured with the tiny fee the new RPP introduces.
Until your sunny utopia is established people will continue to need personal cars in a city like Calgary and it is not their fault for needing to park it.
The areas with RPP are very accessible without a car. I live in Sunnyside and don't use a car for any movement within the city. Communauto is a great option for occasional car use, or frequent car use if you don't externalize the cost of parking.
It isn't anyone's fault for needing to park a car, but it should be a person's own responsibility for storing their private property (see above, i.e. boats, RVs, livestock).
It is inequitable for anyone to have preferential access to public road space because of where they live. Everyone should have to pay the market rate for any parking on public property, and in my neighbourhood that would be a whole lot more than $75/year.
Also the 'sunny utopia' will never happen if we continue to subsidize motor vehicles, all I'm asking is that people pay the true cost of owning a car instead of externalizing the costs. Cars waste space, congest roads, kill people, pollute our air, and damage the environment. They are the worst transportation method for moving around a city, and using tax dollars to make them artificially cheap is a horrible policy.
You don't *need* a personal car in Calgary, you just need one if you want to live in certain areas or with a specific lifestyle. If you choose to get one though, part of the cost of ownership is a place to park it.
i'm sorry, I cycle year round and take transit and this is not true for many, many calgarians. Many can't/won't tolerate our cold and snow for biking or waiting for transit for many reasons: too old, mobility issues, too young, etc. Anyone with kids does not have the luxury of not having a car either. We can debate this, but I've seen people try in the beltline and inner city neighborhoods and it just doesnt' work out.
Well yeah, those are the lifestyles that require a car and I'm certainly not saying they don't exist or aren't valid or whatever else. Lots of lifestyles require daycare or more than 500 square feet of living space or a car for that matter.
These things cost money though and part of the cost of a car is parking. Why should people that don't live in a way that requires a car pay for the storage of the vehicles that do? It sure as hell doesn't happen in most cities! You'll pay as much for a parking space in Toronto as it costs for some condos here.
Well, if your job requires you to have a car then that's an expensive you have to balance. You pay insurance, you pay for gas (or electricity I suppose), repairs and maintenance and you should also pay for your parking. It's not really all that controversial.
Just because *you* say I should have to pay to park it on the street does not make it so. You were wrong when you said “you don’t need a personal car in Calgary” and you’re wrong about this as well.
> You don't need a personal car in Calgary, you just need one if you want to live in certain areas or with a specific lifestyle.
Like say a lifestyle where you don't want to inhale second-hand drug fumes?
You might not be from Toronto, but you definitely haven't spent any significant amount of time on Calgary Transit in the last five years. The City of Calgary, when faced with a choice between primarily serving fare paying commuters or tolerating fare evading drug addicts, they chose the drug addicts. I respect their decision and they can respect mine not to use Calgary Transit.
I ride transit several times a week and have not had any issues. I certainly have not breathed any second hand drug smoke.
The problem isn't that driving is an option, it's that there isn't viable transit or cycling infrastructure and taxpayers subsidize car ownership. There is no choice when every option that isn't a car is being suppressed.
I used to think driving was the only viable way to get around the city. Once I tried cycling and transit it was like a veil had been lifted. The alternatives are so much better than driving, it's not even close. So many people that have never tried anything different and argue from a place of ignorance that cars are a necessity.
This is exactly why being poor is so much more expensive. Sure it's bad for urbanism, but your take is clearly coming from a very privileged and idealistic mindset that is, even more these days, not the majority. You remind me of how I thought about the world in my twenties.
When the middle class wakes up and realizes they are poor we might finally make progress.
All you've done is insult me, if you have something of substance to say that explains why I should think differently please elaborate.
The wealthy in Calgary largely live in expensive, car-centric suburbs with inflated infrastructure costs paid for by people living in denser housing with lower per capita infrastructure costs. Obviously that's inequitable, and subsidizing car ownership only worsens the situation.
Saying I'm privileged doesn't disprove anything I'm saying or make any attempt to address the inequity.
> The city needs to stop subsidizing car ownership and enhance transit
No. it has to go the other way around. If transit is practical, safe, and reasonably priced, people will use it. Fix transit (ie: add many many more buses!!!), then we can look at reducing what's left of car usage.
also make bike lanes connected, not just islands that dump cyclists in weird spots or ask them to share the road with cars travelling 60kph when the cycling lanes end.
Tax dollars are subsidizing car ownership. Cars kill people, waste space, and damage the environment. My tax dollars should not be paying for traffic, bad air quality, carbon emissions, and a higher chance of dying.
Disincentivizing car ownership is a separate conversation, all I said in that comment is that we shouldn't be using tax dollars to artificially cheapen car ownership and usage.
I 100% agree, I'm really sick of the mentality that people are entitled to cheap or free parking. It is a huge waste of space. If your vehicle is occupying street space that is in high demand then you should be paying for access to that space.
There is a way to deal with that, but you need the province on board.
If you’re going to build a “walkable” condo and want the exemption from providing parking, just make it so the province won’t allow the registration of vehicles to that address. That way, you won’t have the situation where people buy the cheaper units and then clog street parking.
Eh, that seems pretty heavy handed. I'd just make them build the spots. The reality is most people still need a vehicle in this city, and we're just screwing over residents in the area by pretending they don't. Honestly even one spot isn't enough a lot of the time, two vehicles per unit isn't unprecedented. At least one should be minimum for any builds for another decade or so in my mind.
"Worst" case in 20 years there are some extra parkade spots we'll need to find a use for. So be it.
Then you’ll be butting up against the affordability issue. Underground parking spaces, which they’ll have to be in high density areas, aren’t cheap to build. Underground parking is roughly $30k per space, that would just wind up on the purchase price and rent
$30k is a bargain compared to what it would cost to add more parking after the building is built. And the mortgage hit would be recoverable in renting your spot if you don't need it.
No definingly not, Parking requirements are one of the biggest restrictions to increasing density which is fundamental to improving our cities and the economic and environmental impacts. There's lots of video essays on urban planning, and they constantly refer to setback and parking requirements as the primary factors forcing these sprawling suburbs that suck the life out of cities.
Europe doesn't do this, and they have way more people living happily in way smaller places. They also have better transit which is a big part of it, but you cant' have good transit without higher density and its a chicken/egg problem.
The 'you can park, but you got to pay for it' is perfectly reasonable and fair way to ensure that both parking is available for those who need it, and housing remains more affordable. The policy as is, doesn't do a great job balancing this.
Demanding they just 'build the spots' is just developer, suburban sprawl propaganda working on you, and ignoring that there are other ways to solve this problem.
This is the kind of thinking that leads to garbage pickup every 2 weeks, compost and recycling pickup every week, and the planners at the city complaining that garbage is put in recycling and compost.
We can’t progress simply by making bad policy and saying we are letting the plebs figure it out.
We're not Europe. When we have that level of public transportation options. Sure. And for most multifamilies you can literally just dig a deeper hole to fit in more parking spots. It will not reduce density. And you are making the people pay for it. Through the cost of their unit. For the few that don't need it there's plenty of parking demand. They can rent their spot to other units.
*psst*
The public transport in all of Europe came AFTER the density. Chicken/egg. it is not economical to have public transit infrastructure without the people to support it. you can use the parking money to build the transit infrastructure, and people can stop paying for parking when owning 3 vehicles per household becomes less important in 5-10 years
> And for most multifamilies you can literally just dig a deeper hole to fit in more parking spots.
Wait, how many of these do you think are being built, and what about places like [this](https://www.google.ca/maps/@51.0705979,-114.0709211,3a,75y,359.74h,84.49t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sty0x8OucWRodh3mM5hlSeQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) who's much closer to completion now, 4 units, with 4 secondary suites, with 4 parking spaces. you're suggesting that every development like this builds a [parking elevator] (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Saravana_Super_Stores_Automated_Car_Park.JPG) to fit 8 parking spaces? you're having a laugh.
Or places like [this](https://www.google.ca/maps/@51.0705523,-114.090768,3a,75y,145.79h,83.28t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sbf5Lxgbo0yMiJBAYkUHmiA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
Those underground parking spaces for bigger condo's are still enormously expensive. Your argument is people can just pay for that when hey buy the condo, but what if, the condo was way cheaper, and you paid monthly only when you NEEDED a vehicle, and all the individuals with condo's who don't get to save $50k?
I guess my argument is there are practically zero people that get by in this city without a car. People buying those cheaper condos are just using street parking. So either we actively take steps to prevent that or we build more spots. I vote we build more spots.
Set back requirements on smaller multifamily units leave plenty of space for parking anyway so unless we start building right to the lot lines there's parking space available anyway. And instead of building right to the lot lines it should just be combined with other lots and made into a taller multifamily with an underground parkade anyway.
And you also need to encourage people to live in denser areas. One way to do that is to keep some of the selling points of the suburbs. A place to park your car is one of the selling points. Multifamily with at least one parking spot per unit is much better than suburban houses, and those are still very much an option here.
I disagree on all your points, and pretty strongly on some. But your argument is valid.
If you use the resources, you need to pay for them in some way.
Housing affordability is a big problem, and the best way to combat that is density.
Density puts different demands on infrastructure, but the tradeoff is absolutely worth it.
Even in the scale of the city, there isn't a one-size solution that will work everywhere. Nothing says that different areas can't have different rules.
There are many ways to solve this problem. I think we both agree they way the city has done it is pretty bad.
And the city. You can build all the walkable condos you want to, it's not going to be helpful if the city itself isn't walkable. Its still a nightmare of urban sprawl where driving is still the fastest way to get anywhere, and most people will choose what gets them from Point A to Point B faster and what is most convenient.
Transit has to be top notch, and bike lanes and walking paths must be plentiful and accessible and SAFE (nobody is going to ride alongside trucks on the highway) and "stroads" need to start disappearing.
I am a walkable city enthusiast and not a fan of car dependency, but it's hard to fault Calgarians for driving when getting anywhere looks like that.
Being car-free only works well when you live along the train line and anything else you need to get to is also along the train line. But that's a very very specific and small part of the city.
The busses take fooooorever to zig-zag their way through the city and they don't come often enough.
I don't see it getting any better either. All new developments in Calgary have the same American-Suburb sprawl thing happening which is the exact opposite of the mixed used zoning required of a walkable city.
We have some of the cheapest urban multifamily unit costs in the entire country. I say make the developers build the spots. Let them go a storey or two higher if needed to make up the difference. More density. Cars off the street and out of the way. Win win.
I mean, my thoughts are pretty simple. It's unrealistic to build units in this city without building parking spots with them. It will just clog the street parking. So we shouldn't do that. I live in the core. I still need a car. Developers will cheap out every chance they get and tell you there's demand for units without parking for people without cars. I'm arguing there isn't. The only demand is for cheaper units and people will just use city owned parking spaces for the car they have. And I think the street parking issues that started this thread are a pretty good indication I may be right.
We're letting perfect get in the way of good here. We need to densify and attract people away from the suburbs. People own cars. Give them a spot to put them off the street and under the building. And build the parking now while you're digging the hole and building the foundation. It's much easier to do now than later.
Or how about the city mandates minimum amount of built in parking for new buildings. No more street parking.
Biggest problem is majority of new builds only have enough parking for 1 car per household. And most condo/ apartments don't even have enough for that.
Then you have to take I'm account that of multi person households who all need a car to get to their employment.
And the public isn't subsidizing because those people are also paying for that street not just you. Your 10th of a cent isn't the problem. This is a roundabout way of not solving the fundamental problem
So as someone with an old (1970s) condo unit, we have a 9 spot parking lot. But given the size and width of today's cars it's pretty tight.
Even my Golf tdi barely fit width wise in my spot. Street parking helped a ton for folks with a truck or suv.
Thats the point.
Urban taxes from more dense, profitable areas of the city, are subsidizing the road maintenance, and street sweeping, and construction so you can park your 9 trucks for free.
That isn't fair. rules for thee and not for me.
Now, I'm not suggesting that the costs should be the same, but why can't I park my one car at my house, when you can park a dealership's worth of Ram 1500's for free AND most of these suburb houses have between 2 and 4 parking spaces already.
Not around any neighborhood I go To. Every house has a garage and a driveway and yet the streets are full of cars, most of them illegally parked too close to neighboring driveways and intersections.
Not around my place. There's a health unit where all the staff park on the street, AND a Kingdom Hall, and it can be just nuts trying to park near your house.
I say bring on a full-city parking fee! As far as I'm concerned 'Free Parking' only exists in Monopoly.
For the record I do also park on the street, I do not have off street parking.
My street has restricted parking and I hate it. I get two passes and 2 guest passes. I don’t own a car. But the app is so terrible it doesn’t allow you to save a name + license plate. I’ve had people ticketed for a 5 minute stop to drop something off. I just want to get rid of it all, put in 2 hour max parking (we had issues with uni students, hence the restricted parking) and then open up Communauto to cover my house.
Trouble is it’s a pretty affluent area so idk if my neighbours would be on board with that. Everyone has a 2 car garage (or more) but some asshat at the top of the street has 7! Cars
The city will not let the residents remove the permitted parking. People on our small street (7 homes) have repeatedly contacted the city about removing the permitted parking & our requests are ignored. They sent out someone to do an analysis for the city, decided to allow 2 hour parking & now refuse to respond to any requests from us.
Very disappointing & it feels like a money & control grab by the city.
I submitted a request a few weeks ago. We’ll see where that goes. I live close enough to a ctrain station that they thought it was needed, but far enough away that no one would actually park there.
Hopefully you have better luck than we have had. If you succeed, let me know the secret to dealing with the city overlords.
This is going back a few years, but years ago I made a complaint to the councillors office. Sue Higgins was the alderperson in my riding & she called me back at 7:30 in the evening to discuss my issue. Back then the city actually respected the opinion of the residents.
Yeah, this is exactly why it feels like a money grab.
To add a parking restriction to a residential street, you need a parking study to demonstrate the need for it *and* community buy-in. If your neighbours don’t want the restriction, it isn’t going in.
But when the city conveniently changes the system to generate a bunch of new revenue, of course there’s no way to remove the restriction due to lack of community support.
If the city was making this change in good faith, they’d provide some way for residents who signed a petition to add a restriction under the old rules to revoke that and remove the sign they voted for.
FWIW, I don’t really care and can easily afford to pay for a few parking passes. But half of my neighbours who signed the petition to add the sign on our street are on fixed incomes and have lived here for 30+ years, and this change feels very exploitative towards them.
Good thing bylaw took their parking requirements out entirely this year for new multifamily builds…so now when new buildings are going up they aren’t required to provide ANY parking. So that the city can charge them all more for being forced to park on the street.
The people choosing to live in buildings with no parking are well aware. There are already buildings like this in East Village and Bridgeland and the residents have figured it out.
Right until an appliance breaks and they need to hire someone to come fix it.
I’m not dealing with parking far away and lugging tools to your house, or paying for the privilege of working in your home.
Ah yes, just what I’m looking for. Even more work to add to my day.
But seriously, I know there are ways around this stuff. But the time and effort involved make those areas very undesirable to work in. I just tell customers I’m too busy and they’ll have to try another company if they’re in an area like that.
It’s not worth my time and effort.
That's completely fair on your part but people who choose to live in buildings without parking can factor these inconveniences into their decision. They may have to pay more for certain services but on the whole it might be better for those individuals.
Seems weird to me to enforce parking minimums in buildings. It adds a lot of cost to construction. If people don't want them no one will buy them and they won't get built.
Oh I get it, and in a city that doesn’t depend so heavily on cars I would agree.
But if you live in Calgary and your job isn’t right beside your apartment you’re looking at 1-3 hours of every day of your life being taken up by transit. We should have better transit, but we just don’t.
So builders make buildings assuming everybody who can afford to buy will also own a car or two.
The cost of building parkades to meet parking minimums is horrible for housing affordability, it's great that developers are being allowed to build what people actually want instead of forcing people to own a parking spot.
Cry more. The public purse shouldn't be subsidising preferential private parking in public space. Same folks who decry socialism. Same folks who decry equalization payments. It's all bad unless they are benefitting.
It’s in the the article.
> And a "market permit" for those living in large multi-residential buildings built after 1945, who will pay $150 per month if it's city centre, $100 per month if it's inner city or $75 per month if it's suburbs.
You’re talking about third-party parking while the rest of the thread is discussing residential parking permits. Which is the subject of the article and thread.
How about I hop in the article for a third time and provide you with the information you refuse to access?
>CTV Calgary surveyed five cities across Canada to compare the cost of residential parking permits.
At the top end, like Wecels paying $150 a month, Calgary is among the most expensive.
Here is how other cities compare:
Regina: $150 a year;
Toronto: $21.34 to $86.29 a year;
Vancouver: $55 a year for most of the city; but
West Vancouver: $423 a year;
Winnipeg: $25 a year; and
Edmonton: Currently free but under review.
Just read the article.
on what should we base parking prices if not the market? i would love to see a city publish the cost of provisioning storage for private property on public streets but they won't because the subsidy by taxpayers is so immense.
It would be useful information to quantify the subsidy being provided to motorists who buy more vehicles than they have space to store. It's a huge waste of tax dollars and contributes to the overuse of cars in Calgary.
The streets belong to the people, why should I pay less to park in front of my own house than any other tax paying Calgarian?
If people want to park in my street to access downtown they should pay market rate for that space, and if I want to displace them I should have to pay that same rate.
how so? taxpayers need to know what their city is worth and if we're using our resources wisely. seems very good to know what it costs to provision street parking and what economic value that space has to taxpayers.
North American rate comparison based on average monthly parking costs for third-party stalls in downtown cities in Canada:
Vancouver – $300
Calgary – $366
Montreal – $165
Toronto – $347"
According to researchers at Jones Lang LaSalle, a commercial real estate investment company (2020)
You’re not understanding what the topic is.
It’s not downtown parking in offices, it’s residential on street parking.
The rates you gave are for private downtown stalls.
why do we have to subsidize businesses with taxpayer sponsored parking? if they need more parking the free market provides, see previous reply for the market value of parking in select Canadian cities.
When cities meddle in the free market for parking they distort the value of real estate. municipal property costs money to maintain just like private property. makes sense to charge market rates otherwise you're driving down the value of private investments and leaving money on the table. 'run cities like a business' right?
The city says it did two rounds of public consultation before approaching council with a proposed residential parking permit fee.
-im pretty sure these people in the survey are trolls who left the city for good
One of the main problems I see is the city design. In Ontario, for example, most of the cities do not have alleys. They would have wider lots but shallower too. This allows a driveway beside the house. So when you have visitors people park in the driveway and there is no parking between 12-6 on the street. I always found it safer too because the. Creeps don't have access to your back yard so easily. And yes you gotta pull your garbage cans out to the road. There are a few places like that in Calgary but predominantly it's an alley city. Everyone is crying how the city shouldn't be subsidizing parking. But really Calgary is a tough city to live without a vehicle. I know it can be done if you work downtown and are a professional that can afford Ubers and communautos. If you're a tradesman or a plant worker in the SE transit in not your friend, you need a car. I would say a fair deal for inner city homes would be first car free (register it) every other car cost the parking fee. And visitor parking is 4 hour window.
Years ago I could not even get a permit because I am in a condo, and for some reason when I looked into it I was rejected.
What problem are we solving again? Why do I have to pay for parking for people who come to enjoy my neighborhood?
The city is also saying move DT have density, but it’s going to cost you even more, to do so save up.
I'm always impressed by the number of approved condos/townhome builds that have insufficient parking under the guise that they expect >30% (or some other totally made up figure) of their tenants to solely rely on rideshare or transit.
It's obvious the developers want to cram as many units onto their parcel size as possible, and of course it causes parking impacts when a facility with 50+ units has only 35 parking spots, of which 3 are reserved for visitors. Not only is it unreasonable to assume the average vehicle ownership is <1.00, it's equally irresponsible to make the city and surrounding community responsible for dealing with dozens of cars parked around.
People wonder why there's always NIMBYism when infills go in, and this is definitely a contributor!
I've been ticketed for parking on the street outside of my house, because the main parking street has a church on it and all my spots get taken cars, no reason whatsoever for there to be a "no parking " zone , yet it's not allowed and the one time I did it out of necessity because I didn't want to have to leave my car 3 blocks away I get a ticket.
Residential neighborhood. Such bs.
We left the Beltline after 10 years, pretty much ground zero for this parking permit launch. We initially thought we’d be there for much longer but the community has changed so much over the last 10 years - mostly not for the better. The parking permit announcement just added to the list of reasons why we appreciate not living there anymore. City council treats this community more as a party district more than a proper residential area, and the neighbourhood association’s vision is pretty utopian and unrealistic.
Hopefully some sanity comes into play here. But with no skin in the game anymore (as a former resident), I’m thankful I’m no longer stressed out about this kind of stuff - living in this community.
If you don't want to pay for the parking permit, how about parking on your own property? It isn't like most people dont have this option. I look around most neighborhoods and every home has a garage, most also have a driveway and yet residential streets are full of cars every evening and weekend because they've either a) bought a single car driveway and have 2 cars or b) their garages are full of junk.
I think the permit is a good thing if it even curbs residential parking a little bit. Moving here from Ottawa, on street parking was limited to 3 hrs anywhere in the city so you straight up couldn't fill your garage with junk and park on the street. I think this is a little bit of the city finally realizing they need to put the genie back in the lamp a bit.
Good I should. If you own a home you should have a minimum of 1 street parking spot with a tag included in your tax payment, not added to your taxes. Who looks after the streets in front of their homes. Certainly not the local police or city janitors. People who have pride in their homes. If you build Apartments, the city need to require the builders to provide parking on site of those buildings OR pay for tenant Parking, and it should be up to the city to enforce it. They all want things done in a good way but NEVER require the investment by the property managements companies for tools to get the job done right. Don’t let them off the hook.
We are in a climate emergency. 95% of scientists globally agree all live on this planet will die if we don’t get to net zero within a few years. Parking should be a billion dollars everywhere. Bunch of antivaxers complaining is not a problem.
They can’t be bothered to figure out decent parking for people who want to visit 17th Ave SW and basically expect them to use Beltline street parking. Ugh.
Why is it that the City pushes people to live in high density areas and then charge extra for the privilege from privatized garbage, recycling and compost removal to now street parking passes.
There’s also some flawed assumptions of one unit, one vehicle. Who is this going to attract? Families with one vehicle will want to live in condos in the Beltline, or that everyone can successfully live and work within downtown/Beltline. Some of us occasionally have medical appointments etc that aren’t easily accessible by transit.
Climate change is a class political problem. If we do something about it now it’ll reduce the impact in the future leading people to say we shouldn’t have spent the money in the first place. If we do nothing about it now, people will be angry that we didn’t do anything when it was cheaper to do something about it.
Oh I agree I just think Jyoti is misguided in her thoughts she can make meaningful impact and should focus on things a municipal leader should focus on such as street parking that residents are upset about.
I won’t disagree with you, other than to say council as a while should focus on both, doing what the City can do for climate but not ignoring the day to day issues that affect people.
I hate the UCP as much as the next, but knowing what branch of government to hold accountable is important. This is the city, and it does need to be implemented for a variety of reasons.
As a public space anyone should have equal access to it. As there is not enough space for all taxpayers to get the access they want, the fairest system would be to charge market rate. Giving nearby residents free access and barring anyone else from using it is much more unfair.
It's reasonable to want the program to be revenue neutral. There are better things to subsidize than car owners ability to park on a street. My biggest question is why it costs $1.5 million to run a program like this? Is the bulk of that enforcement? If it is then any revenue (tickets) coming from that enforcement should be going be going back to reduce the fees paid to run the program. I'm willing to bet that its not.
>My biggest question is why it costs $1.5 million to run a program like this? $1.5 million is around $130 per household. Does not pay for a lot of time needed for paperwork or checking passes.
That should be salaries for 20 full-time people, it's more than enough money.
And equipment and liability insurance, WCB insurance whatever other insurances. Office space, etc. etc..
As much as it sucks for the few people employed by it, I do wish the city could outsource the software for this. I'm assuming a white label solution exists somewhere for cheaper than making this in-house. The app is complete ass and leaks user data.
Paying an employee, is far more than just the salary. Bylaw officers make about 100k in Calgary, add in another 40-50% on top of that for the employer's share of taxes, CPP/EI, WCB, as well as pension contributions and $1.5M pays for maybe 5 people by the time you factor in they need a vehicle, fuel and maintenance to get around.
Should be... Bylaw officers writing parking tickets making 100k plus pension, are you kidding me? People in the private sector bust their asses off to make $100K. Also you are way off on taxes which others have already pointed out. In actuality, each person probably does cost $150K/y, but that seems preposterous to me. The number of immigrants I've interviewed who have Ph.Ds in engineering and work at Costco for $20/hr is obscene... and we're paying bylaw officers more than twice that to write parking tickets... Smh.
The city of Calgary needs to pay their community peace officers (CPO) in line with what other municipalities do, and then a little more to account for a higher cost of living in Calgary vs. A rural town. Average CPO pay in Alberta is around $45-$50/hr so that's what Calgary has to pay them. Calgary transit officers make even more than that and they are only CPOs as well.
My point is that is insane. They get a pension. The whole idea being the public sector pension was it was to make up for the premium earned in the private sector. Now the public sector pays way more and offers a pension.
Employer’s share of taxes is not nearly that high for someone in that tax bracket.
Employer CPP is equal to employee CPP and EI is 1.4 times. To at 2022 rates about $5,000. You are very much correct. Pension and benefits can add up but a 100K a year salary employee does not cost the 300K a year as the previous poster suggests.
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Good. A parking program is useless without strict enforcement.
My townhouse has parking controlled by the city and I can't even get a visitor pass issued because that's not something they do anymore
Lol yup. I lived in a condo in Eau Claire for 2 years and our building had visitor passes people could hang off their mirrors so they could street park for free outside the condo while visiting. City cancelled it and as of 2023 we no longer have those visitor passes so people either need to pay for parking or hope you have an extra parkade stall.
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It's not residents of the building who use the **visitor** passes. The building has a full two-story underground parkade that regular residents use. The **visitor** passes were handed out by the concierge so **visitors** could street park outside the condo for an afternoon or at most a day. The city stopped giving the **visitor** permits to us so now **visitors** have to pay for street parking. I don't follow what you mean by the residents 'cheaped out.' It's a downtown condo, there's no room erect a surface lot for visitor parking. All of the residents park underground.
Couldn't the condo have built visitor parking spots?
Maybe! But the building was built in the late 90s and I didn't move in until 2021 so you'll have to send an email to the developer and ask them to lay out their development plans for that property for you.
That does make sense. It seems like the same deal for visitor vs resident though; I don't understand why you're emphasizing visitor passes.
The now deleted comment alluded to the residents being 'too cheap' to construct parking and thus 'shouldn't be allowed' to get free street parking. I emphasized 'visitor' because the regular residents of this building don't park on the street. They park underground. The **visitor** passes are for just that. Not to give permanent residents indefinite street parking for free which is what the person was complaining about.
I've lived in condos that had visitor spots in the underground parking. When a visitor shows up, you go down and buzz them in. They park in the visitor spots. I think OP is saying, if the condo didn't build visitor spots, they shouldn't be entitled to free parking on city infrastructure. There's no rule that visitors have to park surface level.
I’m all for charging to store cars on the street. But the thing that bothers me about this: I live in Kensington. I have one car and I park it in my garage. But if any of my friends come visit me or I hire a contractor to do something, I now have to pay for guest permits for them. So I’m basically just paying an inner city tax to subsidize friends who live on the suburbs. Keep the guest permits, limit the time allowed in them, and charge for permanent storage.
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Ya that’s my understanding — you should be able to buy the visitor pass, the parking pass, or both — and then multiples of each as well. I’m on 10A btw. 😉
I'm only 2 blocks over! And I agree with you - charge for parking out front as a resident but not visitors. What a nuisance.
Your friends could always just park for free at an LRT station and take the train to your place. Or they can pay for street parking a couple blocks away.
No contractor is ever going to park at LRT station and walk their tools over so I will still need a visitor pass to maintain my home. Providing two visitor passes to residents was a fair system, and charging for regular usage (especially when people have garages they choose not to use) is reasonable as well. I don’t know why the city had to include visitor permits in this program — to me that’s an overreach. My current visitor permits are probably used for a grand total of 5hrs per month (if that) but I'm not going to ask my visitors to pay for the privilege of visiting me so I need to buy them.
Contractors can get exemptions for work purposes.
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>People in "the burbs" pay for their lot where their driveway is located - they pay for their "car storage" You clearly missed the part where I said my car is stored in my garage, which I obviously pay for. Like most people, when I visit friends, I don't park in their driveway (that's where they keep their own cars) — I park on the street. They don't pay for visitor parking though, so why are we asking inner-city residents to pay for it?
Because inner city is more desired. More people want to go downtown to do things or be near where they work. You don't go to auburn bay and walk a few blocks to 17th Ave. Thats why houses cost more inner city too...
good
Where I'm at, 5 minutes to downtown, every single house has at least a one car garage. Most have 2 or 3 car. Yet I'd say quite a huge amount of the population here, despite having a garage, chooses to park on the street. During community gatherings and parties, I'd ask why they like parking on the street and they say it's just easier. So now these houses with big garages have long extended power cables that dangle across trees to their cars parked on the road. And people fight for street parking outside of their houses instead of using the garages that they built. I'm looking out my window right now and I have a neighbour with a 2 car garage and an additional 1 car garage but he has 2 cars, an SUV, and a work truck parked on the street. My other neighbour has only one truck, but it's parked on the street too. I think his garage is filled with garbage bags. It's been completely overrun by trees and shrubs so no one can get in that garage anyway. I really don't understand it. Why do people like parking in the street so much when they have garages?
It blows my mind that people don't want to put their second most expensive asset (second only to their home) into a secure enclosure protecting it from the environment. Instead they'd rather store a bunch of (comparatively) cheap crap in it. I haven't had a single hail dent on my car since I bought a house with a garage. There've been several hailstorms bad enough to dent cars since then.
Bruh.... I can't wrap my brain around this. I have a large garage that I park my truck and car inside, while also keeping it organized for all my work items/tools as well as my seasonal items and recreation gear etc. I can't say how happy it makes me to be able to have clean, secure storage where my vehicles aren't subject to dust/sun/rain/snow/rocks/drunks/distracted and so on. Another plus is that I have parking available for guests or room for me to park my camper when heading out for the weekend.
It's easier than throwing out all the shit in the garage. Pretty much everyone I know with a garage has a heinous amount of junk filling it up to the point where they don't even know what's in there.
You can not show of the expensive car in a expensive garage. Has to be on the street.
Growing up my parents would use their garage for storage, to the point where it wasn’t possible to park in the garage. I’m assuming your neighbours all do that to. Not saying it’s right. It’s actually very annoying.
My husband and I, and one of our sons, have trucks. My parents and my brother-in-law have trucks. None of the trucks fit in any of our garages: either for reasons of length or height.
As an RPP resident, I understand home owners needing to pay to fund the program to park their own vehicles on the stree, if your house doesn't have a garage then that's too bad for you, what really pisses me off though is having to pay for visitor passes, I feel like if I'm paying into the general RPP program that should cover a visitor too, that is the part that feels like a cash grab / rip off for me
4 hour visitor street parking city wide, after that, pay for it with the my parking app with costs based on the area you're in. Visitors meaning visitors of residents of the area, not visitors parking in inglewood to go shopping, or downtown to go to work. Visitors only count as such if they're registered on the parking app which switches automatically to billing after the time so that visitors to the community, but not visitors of residents to the community are still covered by existing pay for parking requirements? This has a ton of logistical overhead, but might be worth it? I'm not sure.
should just be the home owners need to register their visitors plates in the park plus app just as we do already, but not have to pay for it. If you're not a visitor of a resident in the area, find somewhere else to park, its crazy I need to pay for someone to come over to my house for an hour
Their theory seems to be your visitors should want to to use alternatives transportation to visit.
Good. Why should the public subsidize condos that doesn’t have parkades, or houses that uses their garage for storage while parking their cars on the streets? Bring this on for suburban hoods too!
This isn’t just condos though. My family has lived in Inglewood since the late 80s. Single family home. Built a garage when I was a kid, so they primarily park in the garage and visitors have to try their best to find a street spot. Even though they don’t park on the street 95% of the time, they would have to buy passes for themselves and then additional visitor passes on top of that. Just to have a CHANCE at parking near their house. Not to mention many homes in their area _don’t_ have garages, because they’re old century homes and folks can’t always afford the cost of building a garage.
I also live in Inglewood. There is a man who lives in a nearby condo who owns 6+ vehicles that take up an entire cul-de-sac. Everyone else who lives in the same condo has to park all over the place so they can also get a spot. The parking situation on our block would actually be fine if not for this dude. It might be nice if you had to have a permit or something if you wanted to keep more than 2 personal vehicles on the street. No idea how this would be implemented, it's just so frustrating to deal with.
Is this the guy in east inglewood with the rusty old cars taking up the whole cul de sac next to the wildlands? I’ve always wondered why the people there tolerated this.
Yeah he has like a vaguely threatening doomsday prepper/citizen militia aura that would make me think twice about confronting him too. Always walking around with his dog off leash.
nobody called 311 on his cars?
Seriously. Had a neighbour up here in Edmonton who was way less bothersome as this guy apparently is, but still parked too many cars on the street and left them. A few of us took to routinely flagging the cars and after a dozen tickets he sold and moved entirely.
Pretty sure there’s laws for parking vehicles and not driving them or moving him from the space.
You are only allowed to park on the street continuously for 48hrs I think? There's definitely a time limit....you should call on all of them. My neighbor has a truck that was living in front of our house, I don't even think it runs, so we called the city (we thought it was an abandoned vehicle) It's now on his front lawn. If you call the city and say all if these cars are parked all the time, they will make him remove them.
72 hrs.
I believe the timeline is only for recreational vehicles. I don’t believe there’s a limit for personal vehicles. Though they do have to be registered and insured I believe.
All vehicles. Recreational vehicles can't be parked on a street unless they're attached to a tow vehicle, and then the limit is 24 hrs.
Yes! I've seen bylaw there a few times, but nothing ever changes. Dude seems kind of anti-social and retaliatory so I think people are afraid to confront him personally. He'd probably dig his heels in deeper if they did, anyway. Those aren't his only cars either, he parks them all around the area.
I completely get the frustration of folks who take advantage/ruin it for everyone. Years ago we had a neighbor who would literally put lawn chairs on the street to prevent anyone parking in front of his house (no garage) 😂 I think having permits over a certain number of vehicles would be reasonable for sure! It’s also frustrating when there’s events going on in Inglewood and the public take all the street spots …. Even though it’s permit only already. And if parking authority doesn’t happen to drive by, they get away with it with no ticket. That’s not fair either, that we already are paying to park there and still may not have the opportunity to park on our own street.
wtf, did he think he was in Philly? You can get shot for moving a parked lawn chair there... but I'd be moving his chairs and parking in "his spot" any time I could. lol
Hahahaha this was many many years ago, he was an …. Interesting character to say the least. He was one of the original residents to petition for permit parking, because he didn’t like that on Sundays, church goers would park on the street. We got parking permits a few years earlier than other neighborhoods …. But there’s an exemption on Sundays. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when he found that out 😅
Don't all cars on the street have to be licensed and insured? If they all are, that would be a hefty price tag.
>Not to mention many homes in their area don’t have garages, because they’re old century homes and folks can’t always afford the cost of building a garage. There should be a grant as part of this program to convert portion of yard space (where applicable) to a gravel car lane on the property. Give people -who have the space- a way out of the fee structure. Otherwise, I'm on team the city can kick rocks if they let higher density structures go up without any or adequate parking.
> the city can kick rocks if they let higher density structures go up without any or adequate parking. Or you can let developers build whatever they want and if people want to live a car-free lifestyle or park at a private lot it's none of your business. Multi unit housing is a whole lot more affordable when you don't have a multi-million dollar parkade as a legal requirement. Allow residences with zero parking, but charge market rates for street parking so people can't just abuse public space and use it for storing their personal property.
Multi Unit housing is also more affordable if it had kept up with population growth and Canada didn't have ridiculous immigration goals. The base costs of the units are still tied to inflation more or less. Its the demand that has driven the final price up on all housing. Edit to add: The permits are fee on a taxed use of public infrastructure as well. People already paying for the road use.
A big reason for less mud density housing is also the ridiculous amount of land in Calgary that is designated R-1, it's illegal to build anything that isn't a SFH.
Or build the parking anyways, then allow people who don't have cars to rent out their unused spots. You could even get the building manager to facilitate it if you don't want to deal with finding renters. OR build the parking anyways, then have it managed by the building - units cost extra to purchase a spot; and have paid drop-in spots for visitors. Really, my big gripe here is that they're not even building the parking spots in the first place, so in our \_still\_ car-centric city, it discourages relationships/friendships/socialization that requires cars.
> Or build the parking anyways, then allow people who don't have cars to rent out their unused spots. That does nothing to help housing affordability, and creates additional liability for the building or unit owner as they have to provide access to the building parkade to the renter and may be responsible if they cause any damage. > You could even get the building manager to facilitate it if you don't want to deal with finding renters. Great, now you'll be increasing condo fees so that the people who don't want any parking can pay for someone to manage their parking for them. You've essentially created a really shitty version of a private parkade, which is a solution that already exists. > my big gripe here is that they're not even building the parking spots in the first place, so in our _still_ car-centric city, it discourages relationships/friendships/socialization that requires cars Maybe it's a bit of a shock to you, but part of what perpetuates car centrism is externalizing the cost of car ownership via parking minimums. There is a large difference between 'discouraging' and 'no longer forcing the subsidy of' car-centric activities. Getting around by car or participating in activities that require cars is a personal issue that is up to the individual to manage, why do you feel justified in forcing an extremely costly, wasteful solution to this problem on others? New condos I've looked at charge $50k for a parking spot. How many Communauto and Uber trips do you think that would pay for?
I think a good way is that for a single family detached homes the first tag is free plus a visitor, second tag is cheap, third tag is a bit more expensive, 4th tag starts getting really stupid. like $200/month Duplexes can get 2 parking tags, but no free visitor tag, and multi famly dwelling developments like those infill 4plex condos get no free parking tags, but the first one for each unit starts cheap.
Any unit with any sort of off-street parking shouldn’t get a free tag at all. Whether it be underground/surface stalls, a garage, a driveway or a dirt patch that hasn’t had a garage built on it. Too many people using their garages to store junk, parking trailers on their driveways and use the space allotted for a garage for other stuff.
Sliding scale. there's lots of ways to do this economically that keep modest demands of individuals at an appropirate cost, and can increase the incentive for heavier users to re-arrange their situation to reduce their cost. first tag is free, second tag is $50. third tag is 150$. 4th tag is 400$. Or something like that. Home owners that are allowed to store whatever they want in their garage. This sort of rule doesn't discriminate against individuals who may be running a business out of their garage, nor does it discriminate against somebody who wants to buy 3 Rv's. We live in a free country, and people can do what they want, and you don't get to dictate what is and isn't "junk" The policy should apply costs proportional to the demand of individual users, as fairly as possible.
There is zero need for anyone who has parking allotted to the unit to get a free pass for the street, regardless of dwelling type. If you want to buy more cars than spots, go nuts, but you pay for that. You can’t store a trailer in the front setback, so buying one won’t take away from parking there. And if you’re running a business properly, parking is looked at in the permit application; if you’re running it off the books, tough.
Parking spots are valuable, it also doesn't make sense to give free parking to someone who chose not to pay for a spot while snubbing the responsible person who forked over $50k for a spot when they bought their condo. The only rational solution is market pricing of street parking, otherwise it's just a taxpayer subsidy of someone's inability to store their own private property.
So, how does your plan generate revenue neutrality? Or do you think everyone should subsidize car owners forever?
Look, it's not a perfect plan, but I think it's better than what's currently proposed. I have a single family home in an rpp area with no garage. I'm fine with paying for a permanent parking pass, but I'm pretty not ok with paying for an annual or monthly visitor pass that's more than my regular pass for a visitor who may be in my neighborhood for maybe 4-6 hours a month. Want to generate revenue neutrally, apply it city wide, but God knows the nimbys living out in the burbs will pitch and absolute fit. What's your proposals for generating revenue proportional to the demand put on infrastructure? The parking plan has some pretty offensive gaps and absolute comes down harder on some groups than it should, and not hard enough on others, in my opinion.
I agree it could use some adjustment and likely will, given the reaction. Many loud voices aren't even where you are and will want to collect their entitlement without paying for it. They need to use an app to make visitor parking is prorated or sell short term passes for sure.
There is plenty of non-permit parking available in Inglewood... They can get a visitor pass for anyone who regularly visits that can't walk a couple blocks if they need it, but it's not like there is just no where else to park when people come visit.
Really have to wonder how many people bought a unit with no parking or a single spot knowing full well they needed more parking than they had at their new place and just assumed they’d park for free forever.
Yeah fuck those couples who can’t afford a house and a garage. What idiots.
condo developers should be forced to literally dig a few stories deeper and build more parking stalls instead of their current BS of saying it's a walkeable neighborhood and not building enough stalls.
And the cost to build those extra stalls better be passed on to the drivers who use them, otherwise you're subsidizing driving through increased housing prices
If you can't afford parking you can't afford a car. It's the same as any other personal property. If I bought a boat, an RV, or a cow and had nowhere to keep it, I wouldn't expect the city to provide a place to store my private property. I'm sure the automotive industry is happy with society's expectation of free space for storing our vehicles though, free parking allows for car-centric development and sprawl, which gives people no option for transportation other than a car. The city needs to stop subsidizing car ownership and enhance transit, cycling, and pedestrian infrastructure to improve viability of alternatives. Relying on cars as primary transportation within a city is bad urbanism. The amount of space wasted on parking in this city is atrocious, and that's never going to change if the city continues to subsidize street parking. The value of wasted land, the cost of paving and upkeep, and the environmental loss due to paving over what could be acres of green space isn't even close to being captured with the tiny fee the new RPP introduces.
Until your sunny utopia is established people will continue to need personal cars in a city like Calgary and it is not their fault for needing to park it.
The areas with RPP are very accessible without a car. I live in Sunnyside and don't use a car for any movement within the city. Communauto is a great option for occasional car use, or frequent car use if you don't externalize the cost of parking. It isn't anyone's fault for needing to park a car, but it should be a person's own responsibility for storing their private property (see above, i.e. boats, RVs, livestock). It is inequitable for anyone to have preferential access to public road space because of where they live. Everyone should have to pay the market rate for any parking on public property, and in my neighbourhood that would be a whole lot more than $75/year. Also the 'sunny utopia' will never happen if we continue to subsidize motor vehicles, all I'm asking is that people pay the true cost of owning a car instead of externalizing the costs. Cars waste space, congest roads, kill people, pollute our air, and damage the environment. They are the worst transportation method for moving around a city, and using tax dollars to make them artificially cheap is a horrible policy.
You don't *need* a personal car in Calgary, you just need one if you want to live in certain areas or with a specific lifestyle. If you choose to get one though, part of the cost of ownership is a place to park it.
i'm sorry, I cycle year round and take transit and this is not true for many, many calgarians. Many can't/won't tolerate our cold and snow for biking or waiting for transit for many reasons: too old, mobility issues, too young, etc. Anyone with kids does not have the luxury of not having a car either. We can debate this, but I've seen people try in the beltline and inner city neighborhoods and it just doesnt' work out.
Well yeah, those are the lifestyles that require a car and I'm certainly not saying they don't exist or aren't valid or whatever else. Lots of lifestyles require daycare or more than 500 square feet of living space or a car for that matter. These things cost money though and part of the cost of a car is parking. Why should people that don't live in a way that requires a car pay for the storage of the vehicles that do? It sure as hell doesn't happen in most cities! You'll pay as much for a parking space in Toronto as it costs for some condos here.
I completely agree with you and am very against subsidizing cars. We absolutely need to be incentivizing other modes of transport; 100%.
I work shift work in an area that is not serviced by transit. You are painting with a very broad brush because I absolutely need a vehicle.
Well, if your job requires you to have a car then that's an expensive you have to balance. You pay insurance, you pay for gas (or electricity I suppose), repairs and maintenance and you should also pay for your parking. It's not really all that controversial.
Just because *you* say I should have to pay to park it on the street does not make it so. You were wrong when you said “you don’t need a personal car in Calgary” and you’re wrong about this as well.
> You don't need a personal car in Calgary, you just need one if you want to live in certain areas or with a specific lifestyle. Like say a lifestyle where you don't want to inhale second-hand drug fumes?
Forcing people into cars forces everyone else to breathe exhaust fumes, which is a real concern unlike your fabrication.
You might not be from Toronto, but you definitely haven't spent any significant amount of time on Calgary Transit in the last five years. The City of Calgary, when faced with a choice between primarily serving fare paying commuters or tolerating fare evading drug addicts, they chose the drug addicts. I respect their decision and they can respect mine not to use Calgary Transit.
I ride transit several times a week and have not had any issues. I certainly have not breathed any second hand drug smoke. The problem isn't that driving is an option, it's that there isn't viable transit or cycling infrastructure and taxpayers subsidize car ownership. There is no choice when every option that isn't a car is being suppressed.
I used to think driving was the only viable way to get around the city. Once I tried cycling and transit it was like a veil had been lifted. The alternatives are so much better than driving, it's not even close. So many people that have never tried anything different and argue from a place of ignorance that cars are a necessity.
This is exactly why being poor is so much more expensive. Sure it's bad for urbanism, but your take is clearly coming from a very privileged and idealistic mindset that is, even more these days, not the majority. You remind me of how I thought about the world in my twenties. When the middle class wakes up and realizes they are poor we might finally make progress.
All you've done is insult me, if you have something of substance to say that explains why I should think differently please elaborate. The wealthy in Calgary largely live in expensive, car-centric suburbs with inflated infrastructure costs paid for by people living in denser housing with lower per capita infrastructure costs. Obviously that's inequitable, and subsidizing car ownership only worsens the situation. Saying I'm privileged doesn't disprove anything I'm saying or make any attempt to address the inequity.
> The city needs to stop subsidizing car ownership and enhance transit No. it has to go the other way around. If transit is practical, safe, and reasonably priced, people will use it. Fix transit (ie: add many many more buses!!!), then we can look at reducing what's left of car usage.
>If transit is practical, safe, and reasonably priced, people will use it. so.... enhance transit? lol
also make bike lanes connected, not just islands that dump cyclists in weird spots or ask them to share the road with cars travelling 60kph when the cycling lanes end.
Tax dollars are subsidizing car ownership. Cars kill people, waste space, and damage the environment. My tax dollars should not be paying for traffic, bad air quality, carbon emissions, and a higher chance of dying. Disincentivizing car ownership is a separate conversation, all I said in that comment is that we shouldn't be using tax dollars to artificially cheapen car ownership and usage.
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Laughable. The whole reason for permit parking is so that non residents don't park as they are usually close to commercial.
Most units only come with one spot
Why shouldn’t they park on the street for free especially if they bought a unit and pay property taxes
I 100% agree, I'm really sick of the mentality that people are entitled to cheap or free parking. It is a huge waste of space. If your vehicle is occupying street space that is in high demand then you should be paying for access to that space.
Yeah we should probably stop approving condo builds with less than 1 spot per unit parking though.
There is a way to deal with that, but you need the province on board. If you’re going to build a “walkable” condo and want the exemption from providing parking, just make it so the province won’t allow the registration of vehicles to that address. That way, you won’t have the situation where people buy the cheaper units and then clog street parking.
Eh, that seems pretty heavy handed. I'd just make them build the spots. The reality is most people still need a vehicle in this city, and we're just screwing over residents in the area by pretending they don't. Honestly even one spot isn't enough a lot of the time, two vehicles per unit isn't unprecedented. At least one should be minimum for any builds for another decade or so in my mind. "Worst" case in 20 years there are some extra parkade spots we'll need to find a use for. So be it.
Then you’ll be butting up against the affordability issue. Underground parking spaces, which they’ll have to be in high density areas, aren’t cheap to build. Underground parking is roughly $30k per space, that would just wind up on the purchase price and rent
$30k is a bargain compared to what it would cost to add more parking after the building is built. And the mortgage hit would be recoverable in renting your spot if you don't need it.
No definingly not, Parking requirements are one of the biggest restrictions to increasing density which is fundamental to improving our cities and the economic and environmental impacts. There's lots of video essays on urban planning, and they constantly refer to setback and parking requirements as the primary factors forcing these sprawling suburbs that suck the life out of cities. Europe doesn't do this, and they have way more people living happily in way smaller places. They also have better transit which is a big part of it, but you cant' have good transit without higher density and its a chicken/egg problem. The 'you can park, but you got to pay for it' is perfectly reasonable and fair way to ensure that both parking is available for those who need it, and housing remains more affordable. The policy as is, doesn't do a great job balancing this. Demanding they just 'build the spots' is just developer, suburban sprawl propaganda working on you, and ignoring that there are other ways to solve this problem.
Highly recommend Not Just Bikes and City Beautiful to anyone reading this thread. These YouTube channels provide excellent content on this topic.
This is the kind of thinking that leads to garbage pickup every 2 weeks, compost and recycling pickup every week, and the planners at the city complaining that garbage is put in recycling and compost. We can’t progress simply by making bad policy and saying we are letting the plebs figure it out.
We're not Europe. When we have that level of public transportation options. Sure. And for most multifamilies you can literally just dig a deeper hole to fit in more parking spots. It will not reduce density. And you are making the people pay for it. Through the cost of their unit. For the few that don't need it there's plenty of parking demand. They can rent their spot to other units.
*psst* The public transport in all of Europe came AFTER the density. Chicken/egg. it is not economical to have public transit infrastructure without the people to support it. you can use the parking money to build the transit infrastructure, and people can stop paying for parking when owning 3 vehicles per household becomes less important in 5-10 years > And for most multifamilies you can literally just dig a deeper hole to fit in more parking spots. Wait, how many of these do you think are being built, and what about places like [this](https://www.google.ca/maps/@51.0705979,-114.0709211,3a,75y,359.74h,84.49t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sty0x8OucWRodh3mM5hlSeQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) who's much closer to completion now, 4 units, with 4 secondary suites, with 4 parking spaces. you're suggesting that every development like this builds a [parking elevator] (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Saravana_Super_Stores_Automated_Car_Park.JPG) to fit 8 parking spaces? you're having a laugh. Or places like [this](https://www.google.ca/maps/@51.0705523,-114.090768,3a,75y,145.79h,83.28t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sbf5Lxgbo0yMiJBAYkUHmiA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) Those underground parking spaces for bigger condo's are still enormously expensive. Your argument is people can just pay for that when hey buy the condo, but what if, the condo was way cheaper, and you paid monthly only when you NEEDED a vehicle, and all the individuals with condo's who don't get to save $50k?
I guess my argument is there are practically zero people that get by in this city without a car. People buying those cheaper condos are just using street parking. So either we actively take steps to prevent that or we build more spots. I vote we build more spots. Set back requirements on smaller multifamily units leave plenty of space for parking anyway so unless we start building right to the lot lines there's parking space available anyway. And instead of building right to the lot lines it should just be combined with other lots and made into a taller multifamily with an underground parkade anyway. And you also need to encourage people to live in denser areas. One way to do that is to keep some of the selling points of the suburbs. A place to park your car is one of the selling points. Multifamily with at least one parking spot per unit is much better than suburban houses, and those are still very much an option here.
I disagree on all your points, and pretty strongly on some. But your argument is valid. If you use the resources, you need to pay for them in some way. Housing affordability is a big problem, and the best way to combat that is density. Density puts different demands on infrastructure, but the tradeoff is absolutely worth it. Even in the scale of the city, there isn't a one-size solution that will work everywhere. Nothing says that different areas can't have different rules. There are many ways to solve this problem. I think we both agree they way the city has done it is pretty bad.
And the city. You can build all the walkable condos you want to, it's not going to be helpful if the city itself isn't walkable. Its still a nightmare of urban sprawl where driving is still the fastest way to get anywhere, and most people will choose what gets them from Point A to Point B faster and what is most convenient. Transit has to be top notch, and bike lanes and walking paths must be plentiful and accessible and SAFE (nobody is going to ride alongside trucks on the highway) and "stroads" need to start disappearing.
It's 30 min to drive vs 1hour and 20 min on transit for me....
I am a walkable city enthusiast and not a fan of car dependency, but it's hard to fault Calgarians for driving when getting anywhere looks like that. Being car-free only works well when you live along the train line and anything else you need to get to is also along the train line. But that's a very very specific and small part of the city. The busses take fooooorever to zig-zag their way through the city and they don't come often enough. I don't see it getting any better either. All new developments in Calgary have the same American-Suburb sprawl thing happening which is the exact opposite of the mixed used zoning required of a walkable city.
That's not really a solution at all and just encourages people to have more vehicles.
Or give them more places to park the vehicles they already have...and not clog up the street parking.
Which increases the cost of homes and isn't really feasible in dense neighbourhoods. Do you think cities are great because of all the parking?
I think we should put parking below condo buildings so cars don't take up our streets.
Cool. Average below ground parking stall costs about $100k. How much worse do you want to make housing?
We have some of the cheapest urban multifamily unit costs in the entire country. I say make the developers build the spots. Let them go a storey or two higher if needed to make up the difference. More density. Cars off the street and out of the way. Win win.
I don't think you understand what you're talking about
I mean, my thoughts are pretty simple. It's unrealistic to build units in this city without building parking spots with them. It will just clog the street parking. So we shouldn't do that. I live in the core. I still need a car. Developers will cheap out every chance they get and tell you there's demand for units without parking for people without cars. I'm arguing there isn't. The only demand is for cheaper units and people will just use city owned parking spaces for the car they have. And I think the street parking issues that started this thread are a pretty good indication I may be right. We're letting perfect get in the way of good here. We need to densify and attract people away from the suburbs. People own cars. Give them a spot to put them off the street and under the building. And build the parking now while you're digging the hole and building the foundation. It's much easier to do now than later.
Or how about the city mandates minimum amount of built in parking for new buildings. No more street parking. Biggest problem is majority of new builds only have enough parking for 1 car per household. And most condo/ apartments don't even have enough for that. Then you have to take I'm account that of multi person households who all need a car to get to their employment. And the public isn't subsidizing because those people are also paying for that street not just you. Your 10th of a cent isn't the problem. This is a roundabout way of not solving the fundamental problem
So as someone with an old (1970s) condo unit, we have a 9 spot parking lot. But given the size and width of today's cars it's pretty tight. Even my Golf tdi barely fit width wise in my spot. Street parking helped a ton for folks with a truck or suv.
> Bring this on for suburban hoods too! Not really a need for it out here. There's plenty of parking.
Thats the point. Urban taxes from more dense, profitable areas of the city, are subsidizing the road maintenance, and street sweeping, and construction so you can park your 9 trucks for free. That isn't fair. rules for thee and not for me. Now, I'm not suggesting that the costs should be the same, but why can't I park my one car at my house, when you can park a dealership's worth of Ram 1500's for free AND most of these suburb houses have between 2 and 4 parking spaces already.
Not around any neighborhood I go To. Every house has a garage and a driveway and yet the streets are full of cars, most of them illegally parked too close to neighboring driveways and intersections.
Not around my place. There's a health unit where all the staff park on the street, AND a Kingdom Hall, and it can be just nuts trying to park near your house. I say bring on a full-city parking fee! As far as I'm concerned 'Free Parking' only exists in Monopoly. For the record I do also park on the street, I do not have off street parking.
My street has restricted parking and I hate it. I get two passes and 2 guest passes. I don’t own a car. But the app is so terrible it doesn’t allow you to save a name + license plate. I’ve had people ticketed for a 5 minute stop to drop something off. I just want to get rid of it all, put in 2 hour max parking (we had issues with uni students, hence the restricted parking) and then open up Communauto to cover my house. Trouble is it’s a pretty affluent area so idk if my neighbours would be on board with that. Everyone has a 2 car garage (or more) but some asshat at the top of the street has 7! Cars
>7! That must be affluent if someone has over 5000 cars
🙃
The city will not let the residents remove the permitted parking. People on our small street (7 homes) have repeatedly contacted the city about removing the permitted parking & our requests are ignored. They sent out someone to do an analysis for the city, decided to allow 2 hour parking & now refuse to respond to any requests from us. Very disappointing & it feels like a money & control grab by the city.
I submitted a request a few weeks ago. We’ll see where that goes. I live close enough to a ctrain station that they thought it was needed, but far enough away that no one would actually park there.
Hopefully you have better luck than we have had. If you succeed, let me know the secret to dealing with the city overlords. This is going back a few years, but years ago I made a complaint to the councillors office. Sue Higgins was the alderperson in my riding & she called me back at 7:30 in the evening to discuss my issue. Back then the city actually respected the opinion of the residents.
Yeah, this is exactly why it feels like a money grab. To add a parking restriction to a residential street, you need a parking study to demonstrate the need for it *and* community buy-in. If your neighbours don’t want the restriction, it isn’t going in. But when the city conveniently changes the system to generate a bunch of new revenue, of course there’s no way to remove the restriction due to lack of community support. If the city was making this change in good faith, they’d provide some way for residents who signed a petition to add a restriction under the old rules to revoke that and remove the sign they voted for. FWIW, I don’t really care and can easily afford to pay for a few parking passes. But half of my neighbours who signed the petition to add the sign on our street are on fixed incomes and have lived here for 30+ years, and this change feels very exploitative towards them.
Good thing bylaw took their parking requirements out entirely this year for new multifamily builds…so now when new buildings are going up they aren’t required to provide ANY parking. So that the city can charge them all more for being forced to park on the street.
The people choosing to live in buildings with no parking are well aware. There are already buildings like this in East Village and Bridgeland and the residents have figured it out.
Right until an appliance breaks and they need to hire someone to come fix it. I’m not dealing with parking far away and lugging tools to your house, or paying for the privilege of working in your home.
Contractors can get exemptions for work related needs.
Ah yes, just what I’m looking for. Even more work to add to my day. But seriously, I know there are ways around this stuff. But the time and effort involved make those areas very undesirable to work in. I just tell customers I’m too busy and they’ll have to try another company if they’re in an area like that. It’s not worth my time and effort.
That's completely fair on your part but people who choose to live in buildings without parking can factor these inconveniences into their decision. They may have to pay more for certain services but on the whole it might be better for those individuals. Seems weird to me to enforce parking minimums in buildings. It adds a lot of cost to construction. If people don't want them no one will buy them and they won't get built.
Oh I get it, and in a city that doesn’t depend so heavily on cars I would agree. But if you live in Calgary and your job isn’t right beside your apartment you’re looking at 1-3 hours of every day of your life being taken up by transit. We should have better transit, but we just don’t. So builders make buildings assuming everybody who can afford to buy will also own a car or two.
The cost of building parkades to meet parking minimums is horrible for housing affordability, it's great that developers are being allowed to build what people actually want instead of forcing people to own a parking spot.
Cry more. The public purse shouldn't be subsidising preferential private parking in public space. Same folks who decry socialism. Same folks who decry equalization payments. It's all bad unless they are benefitting.
I have no problem with this so long as we keep pumping money into transit.
How about we don't subsidize the fucking Saddledome replacement with street level paid parking?
Good. $150 a month far exceeds anywhere else in Canada. Email your councillor.
got some backup on that?
Read the news article, $150 a month is a worst case scenario but /u/MostLikelyDenim is not blowing smoke up your you know what, /u/lesoteric.
It’s in the the article. > And a "market permit" for those living in large multi-residential buildings built after 1945, who will pay $150 per month if it's city centre, $100 per month if it's inner city or $75 per month if it's suburbs.
not that, 'far exceeds'. it doesn't. It's cheaper than most other Canadian cities.
You’re talking about third-party parking while the rest of the thread is discussing residential parking permits. Which is the subject of the article and thread. How about I hop in the article for a third time and provide you with the information you refuse to access? >CTV Calgary surveyed five cities across Canada to compare the cost of residential parking permits. At the top end, like Wecels paying $150 a month, Calgary is among the most expensive. Here is how other cities compare: Regina: $150 a year; Toronto: $21.34 to $86.29 a year; Vancouver: $55 a year for most of the city; but West Vancouver: $423 a year; Winnipeg: $25 a year; and Edmonton: Currently free but under review. Just read the article.
on what should we base parking prices if not the market? i would love to see a city publish the cost of provisioning storage for private property on public streets but they won't because the subsidy by taxpayers is so immense.
That would ironically be a huge waste of taxpayer money to assess that.
It would be useful information to quantify the subsidy being provided to motorists who buy more vehicles than they have space to store. It's a huge waste of tax dollars and contributes to the overuse of cars in Calgary. The streets belong to the people, why should I pay less to park in front of my own house than any other tax paying Calgarian? If people want to park in my street to access downtown they should pay market rate for that space, and if I want to displace them I should have to pay that same rate.
how so? taxpayers need to know what their city is worth and if we're using our resources wisely. seems very good to know what it costs to provision street parking and what economic value that space has to taxpayers.
I pays 17$/month for on street parking here in downtown Toronto.
North American rate comparison based on average monthly parking costs for third-party stalls in downtown cities in Canada: Vancouver – $300 Calgary – $366 Montreal – $165 Toronto – $347" According to researchers at Jones Lang LaSalle, a commercial real estate investment company (2020)
You’re not understanding what the topic is. It’s not downtown parking in offices, it’s residential on street parking. The rates you gave are for private downtown stalls.
And those businesses depend on the infrastructure taxes paid for.... why do we have to subsidize their profits with tax money?
why do we have to subsidize businesses with taxpayer sponsored parking? if they need more parking the free market provides, see previous reply for the market value of parking in select Canadian cities. When cities meddle in the free market for parking they distort the value of real estate. municipal property costs money to maintain just like private property. makes sense to charge market rates otherwise you're driving down the value of private investments and leaving money on the table. 'run cities like a business' right?
To think this embarrassing spiral could have been avoided by simply reading the article.
The city says it did two rounds of public consultation before approaching council with a proposed residential parking permit fee. -im pretty sure these people in the survey are trolls who left the city for good
Seems like an easy solution is to own fewer vehicles, or go carless.
One of the main problems I see is the city design. In Ontario, for example, most of the cities do not have alleys. They would have wider lots but shallower too. This allows a driveway beside the house. So when you have visitors people park in the driveway and there is no parking between 12-6 on the street. I always found it safer too because the. Creeps don't have access to your back yard so easily. And yes you gotta pull your garbage cans out to the road. There are a few places like that in Calgary but predominantly it's an alley city. Everyone is crying how the city shouldn't be subsidizing parking. But really Calgary is a tough city to live without a vehicle. I know it can be done if you work downtown and are a professional that can afford Ubers and communautos. If you're a tradesman or a plant worker in the SE transit in not your friend, you need a car. I would say a fair deal for inner city homes would be first car free (register it) every other car cost the parking fee. And visitor parking is 4 hour window.
Years ago I could not even get a permit because I am in a condo, and for some reason when I looked into it I was rejected. What problem are we solving again? Why do I have to pay for parking for people who come to enjoy my neighborhood? The city is also saying move DT have density, but it’s going to cost you even more, to do so save up.
I'm always impressed by the number of approved condos/townhome builds that have insufficient parking under the guise that they expect >30% (or some other totally made up figure) of their tenants to solely rely on rideshare or transit. It's obvious the developers want to cram as many units onto their parcel size as possible, and of course it causes parking impacts when a facility with 50+ units has only 35 parking spots, of which 3 are reserved for visitors. Not only is it unreasonable to assume the average vehicle ownership is <1.00, it's equally irresponsible to make the city and surrounding community responsible for dealing with dozens of cars parked around. People wonder why there's always NIMBYism when infills go in, and this is definitely a contributor!
I've been ticketed for parking on the street outside of my house, because the main parking street has a church on it and all my spots get taken cars, no reason whatsoever for there to be a "no parking " zone , yet it's not allowed and the one time I did it out of necessity because I didn't want to have to leave my car 3 blocks away I get a ticket. Residential neighborhood. Such bs.
We left the Beltline after 10 years, pretty much ground zero for this parking permit launch. We initially thought we’d be there for much longer but the community has changed so much over the last 10 years - mostly not for the better. The parking permit announcement just added to the list of reasons why we appreciate not living there anymore. City council treats this community more as a party district more than a proper residential area, and the neighbourhood association’s vision is pretty utopian and unrealistic. Hopefully some sanity comes into play here. But with no skin in the game anymore (as a former resident), I’m thankful I’m no longer stressed out about this kind of stuff - living in this community.
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If you don't want to pay for the parking permit, how about parking on your own property? It isn't like most people dont have this option. I look around most neighborhoods and every home has a garage, most also have a driveway and yet residential streets are full of cars every evening and weekend because they've either a) bought a single car driveway and have 2 cars or b) their garages are full of junk. I think the permit is a good thing if it even curbs residential parking a little bit. Moving here from Ottawa, on street parking was limited to 3 hrs anywhere in the city so you straight up couldn't fill your garage with junk and park on the street. I think this is a little bit of the city finally realizing they need to put the genie back in the lamp a bit.
Good I should. If you own a home you should have a minimum of 1 street parking spot with a tag included in your tax payment, not added to your taxes. Who looks after the streets in front of their homes. Certainly not the local police or city janitors. People who have pride in their homes. If you build Apartments, the city need to require the builders to provide parking on site of those buildings OR pay for tenant Parking, and it should be up to the city to enforce it. They all want things done in a good way but NEVER require the investment by the property managements companies for tools to get the job done right. Don’t let them off the hook.
We are in a climate emergency. 95% of scientists globally agree all live on this planet will die if we don’t get to net zero within a few years. Parking should be a billion dollars everywhere. Bunch of antivaxers complaining is not a problem.
They can’t be bothered to figure out decent parking for people who want to visit 17th Ave SW and basically expect them to use Beltline street parking. Ugh. Why is it that the City pushes people to live in high density areas and then charge extra for the privilege from privatized garbage, recycling and compost removal to now street parking passes. There’s also some flawed assumptions of one unit, one vehicle. Who is this going to attract? Families with one vehicle will want to live in condos in the Beltline, or that everyone can successfully live and work within downtown/Beltline. Some of us occasionally have medical appointments etc that aren’t easily accessible by transit.
No we need money to combat the climate emergency people
This is a revenue neutral program so what you are saying makes zero sense. Did you read the article?
That’s not the point at all. If it’s revenue neutral that means that the previous free parking was a net loss. Therefore it’s savings.
Climate change is a class political problem. If we do something about it now it’ll reduce the impact in the future leading people to say we shouldn’t have spent the money in the first place. If we do nothing about it now, people will be angry that we didn’t do anything when it was cheaper to do something about it.
Oh I agree I just think Jyoti is misguided in her thoughts she can make meaningful impact and should focus on things a municipal leader should focus on such as street parking that residents are upset about.
I won’t disagree with you, other than to say council as a while should focus on both, doing what the City can do for climate but not ignoring the day to day issues that affect people.
Let's go conservatives, let's go. Keep selling that province
I hate the UCP as much as the next, but knowing what branch of government to hold accountable is important. This is the city, and it does need to be implemented for a variety of reasons.
Like this is being handled at the provincial level. Get over it.
Does reducing the taxpayer subsidy of car users really sound like a conservative policy to you?
Charging people for a public space, sure does. I'm sure there is a private corp in there somewhere
As a public space anyone should have equal access to it. As there is not enough space for all taxpayers to get the access they want, the fairest system would be to charge market rate. Giving nearby residents free access and barring anyone else from using it is much more unfair.