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Squamish’s parking continuum

Have the changes worked? What more should be done?

As downtown Squamish becomes busier, district staff have been working to implement some of the parking strategies council approved in late spring. 

The goal of the changes is to make it easier for people to park downtown. 

New signage was installed to mark the approximately 250 two-hour parking stalls in the downtown core and longer-term parking is now designated to various side streets and in three gravel parking lots: two new lots at the end of Victoria and Main streets, and the gravel site near the BC Hydro lot at the north end of downtown. These longer-term parking spots are meant for employees of downtown businesses, according to Gary Buxton, district general manager of development services and public works. 

New motorcycle spots have been created at the end of rows of parking in the downtown area to allow more vehicles to fit in. Back-in angled parking has also been installed near O’Siyam Pavilion Park. 

Whether or not there is a significant parking problem at all is what the district will look at with an upcoming parking utilization study, Buxton said. 

“You actually have someone come out and count how the stalls are used, how many you have got across the entire downtown,” he said, adding the study will be done over a variety of days and times. 

“I would suspect that on a long weekend, we are probably at maximum in some limited cases [such as] Canada Day… but I suspect on other days it is not at capacity.

“We are probably not at the point where we need to build structures or look at radical parking solutions.” 

Whether the parking situation was ever dire is a matter of perception, Buxton agreed, but he added things are different in Squamish these days and that can cause issues in the community.“You get parking problems when the circumstances change substantially quickly and I won’t deny they have done so even in the year and a half that I have been here,” Buxton said. “Downtown is a lot busier this year than it was last year… People can’t park the way they used to.” 

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Gary Buxton

Nancy McCartney, the chair of the Downtown Squamish Business Improvement Association parking committee, told The Squamish Chief the changes have made a difference downtown. 

“There’s been a lot of work in a short period of time,” McCartney said, praising the district. “Everything that can be done has been done in a short period of time, with little resources.” 

At her Garibaldi Graphics store on Cleveland Avenue, however, McCartney said she still hears parking complaints and believes there are issues that need to be addressed. 

One issue is that people still aren’t aware of where they can and can’t park, so there needs to be more education, McCartney said. A more concerning and complex problem is variances that allow developers to reduce parking from the required amount. 

“It is to the developers’ benefit, but it is to our detriment,” she said. “I understand why the district did it in order to speed up development downtown and make it into the place that it is, but enough is enough.” 

McCartney also questioned why it seems some developers pay less than others for reducing their parking stalls. 

Buxton said backing off on allowing developers to bring forward variances would take an amendment to the zoning bylaw to restrict the issuance of variances. 

“Council always has the ability to vary its bylaws, as it should. So eliminating the possibility of variances is really not possible. It could be made more difficult, unlikely, but not impossible.”

In terms of the fees paid by developers for reducing parking stalls, Buxton said developers, if they choose the cash in lieu route, pay $6,000 per stall to a maximum of four stalls or $24,000.

McCartney also questioned what the movie industry has to pay for taking up customer parking lots downtown. Buxton said filming permits are issued district wide.

“Permits that use parking are not separated from all other permits that don’t use parking,” he said.

Out-of-town strategies

How do other communities deal with parking and is there anything we could learn from their successes and failures? 

Salmon Arm is a popular tourist community of about the same size as Squamish (at the time of the last census in 2011, Salmon Arm had a population of 17,464 to Squamish’s 17,158, according to Statistics Canada) and has had similar parking issues. 

The city put in place some strategies that have worked, for the most part, according to Marcel Bedard, Salmon Arm’s bylaw enforcement officer who coincidentally previously worked in Whistler and shopped in Squamish. 

 Salmon Arm is similar to Squamish in that there isn’t a lot of land to expand in the downtown area for parking and employees claim they can’t rely on the local transit system to get to work. 

In the downtown core, parking is free for one hour, while some lots are free for two hours, and in the outskirts of town there are 10-hour parking metre stalls meant for staff parking, Bedard said.  

“My biggest problem is staff parking on the streets and tying up customer parking,” he said. 

The long-term parking is kept affordable, at 25 cents an hour. 

“We have a lot of people on the outskirts of town parking at those metres – employees – it’s $2 for eight hours.”  

Monthly parking is available at lots for $25 a month, he said. 

“We have waiting lists for all those. If you sell it cheap they will fill up and keep [vehicles] off the street.” 

They tried having two-hour free parking in the downtown core, but found employees managed to work around that to still take up the spots. 

“We had staff coming in at 10 a.m., they would go for lunch at noon and go for coffee – it was hard to control them,” he said. “It just caused me more problems with staff parking.”

Salmon Arm also employs a full-time parking officer in the summer. 

“Their job is simply parking in the downtown core,” Bedard said, adding steady enforcement is key to any parking strategy. “You have to ticket and tow if you need to.” 

Long-range plans include a parking structure at one end of downtown, he said. 

“If we don’t have parking for our customers we won’t have businesses to go to.” 

Mission is bigger than Squamish, at about 32,000 people, according to 2011 census statistics. 

Like Squamish and Salmon Arm, its downtown is restricted by landscape: it is on a hill and has a provincial highway running through. It is free to park in the community’s downtown core.

Mission’s director of engineering and public works, Tracy Kyle, said perception and reality of parking issues can be different. 

District of Mission bylaw staff did a study of the amount of parking available in their downtown. 

“There was one block that was always pretty busy, but the blocks on either side of that where there were businesses, there were always spots available, so I think it was a bit of the public expecting they could drive right outside the business they could go in, hop out, go in and maybe go and drive another block and get out again,” she said. “It may not have been as much of a real shortage of spots.” 

The District of Mission purchased a building with a big lot and designated some of it public parking, Kyle said. The bigger businesses in town, such as the bank, have leased some of that lot for their designated employee parking, she added. 

As in Salmon Arm, staff taking up customer parking has been an issue in Mission. 

“What we did was work with the downtown business association and encourage them to get staff to park a block away, either north or south off the main area,” Kyle said, adding some employees were concerned about walking in the dark to their cars after work in winter. “We tried to encourage them to get a group together… just so everyone felt safe doing that.” 

 

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