PARKING RATES IN DOWNTOWN VICTORIA
PA N D
OR A A VE .
4 HRS MAX
$2.00 ($1 on Sundays) 3 HRS MAX
RNME
$2.50 ($1 on Sundays)
GOVE
2 HRS MAX
W HA RF ST.
$2.50 ($1 on Sundays)
NT ST .
90 MINS MAX
DOUG
L AS S T.
$3.00 ($2 on Sundays)
QUAD
R A ST .
Price per hour:
FORT
YAT E S S T.
S T.
$1.50 ($1 on Sundays)
CITY OF VICTORIA
24 HRS MAX
And caught in the middle are advocates for people with disabilities — like David Willows, who on his own initiative prepared a 51-page report on Victoria’s lack of accessible parking. [That is a whole other parking tale of its own.] THE SUNDAY SOLUTION Servos has no shortage of gripes about downtown parking, including how the city’s new bike lanes “butchered” parking availability. “The availability of public parking is declining as a result of all the new construction and all the private lots disappearing,” Servos says. “I think it’s a real shame.” While a number of private surface parking lots have been lost to development over the past five years, Bill Eisenhauer, City of Victoria head of engagement, says they have been replaced with underground parking in the developments themselves. “Overall the total number of parking stalls in the downtown core has remained relatively unchanged for the past five years,” Eisenhauer says, referring to the number of City-managed public parking spaces in parkades and on-street and the total parking inventory managed in private lots and underground at commercial and residential buildings in the core. This new parking is helping to satisfy some of the overall parking demand in the downtown, but it’s generally only available to people working or living in those buildings. Servos also isn’t a fan of the City of Victoria’s recent initiative to charge for on-street parking in the downtown core on Sundays and use 40 DOUGLAS
that money to give away bus passes for young people. “OK, fine, pay for Sunday parking,” Servos says. “But why they absconded with the Sunday parking revenue to subsidize one of their social agendas is beyond me. That money could easily have been put into enhancing parking downtown.” In an effort to address the parking situation, Servos ran for council in the 2014 election. He came in 16th place with 2,577 votes. Servos says he was considering running in the upcoming byelection, but has recently changed his mind. “If all you want is coffee shops and pot shops that you can walk to, then knock yourself out,” Servos says. “But that makes for a pretty boring downtown.” AVAILABILITY VERSUS COST The Downtown Victoria Business Association (DVBA) polled its membership earlier this year and discovered that parking availability is the number one negative factor impacting businesses. Number two was the cost of parking. Meanwhile, real-time parking availability placed second among the top three elements to improve the downtown business environment. According to the survey, 78.8 per cent, or 305 of the 387 respondents, ranked parking availability as a top four negative factor. More than half the respondents, 57.7 per cent, ranked it the most negative. A majority of respondents, 52.3 per cent,
rated the cost of parking as a top four negative factor, although only 18 per cent of those respondents ranked it number one. DVBA Executive Director Jeff Bray says he’s confident the survey, which went out to about 1,000 of the organization’s 1,500 members, reflects what downtown business operators have said anecdotally about parking. “But we never had anything that actually in any way quantified that,” Bray says. “There’s no question in the last five years we’ve lost significant surface parking in downtown, almost all of it being private parking lots that have been redeveloped into commercial buildings and condos,” Bray says, adding that the bike lanes aren’t to blame. What Bray found most interesting about the survey were the responses to questions about what could be done to improve downtown. “Now, given how prominent our members find the parking situation, it would have been very easy for them just to say, ‘Well, build more parking,’” Bray says. “What they actually said was if we had real-time parking availability information, that would really reduce the stress level our customers have with their coming downtown.” So the DVBA is working with the City of Victoria on two ways to provide drivers with such information. One would be to incorporate parking data on the ConnectVictoria app to display on a dashboard how many spaces are available in real time at, for example, the Johnson Street parkade. The second would be to have signage on the major gateways