One continual gripe that I’ve heard since moving here is that Squamish is lacking parking.
At first, I thought maybe this was a real issue and that I’d been lucky enough never to encounter it.
As of now, however, I’ve been here since April and I’ve never had a day where this was problem.
This complaint is mystifying to me. Compared with any other place I’ve lived, this has been a parking heaven.
The amount of time I’ve had to look for parking has almost never exceeded five minutes. I’ve never had to buy any parking permits. Never had any tickets. Nothing.
For me, that’s amazing.
I arrived here from Montreal and had been living in East Vancouver beforehand.
So let’s put things in perspective. In Montreal, you need a numbered permit to park in any neighbourhood. There are little or no non-permitted parking spots so it’s virtually impossible to park as a guest.
But that’s not all! Because street sweeping — some weird kind of theatre put on by the city which doesn’t actually clean anything — happens twice a week, there are certain times when cars on either the left or right side of the road are completely forbidden from parking or stopping ANYWHERE on that side of the street. And that’s regardless of whether or not you have a paid permit.
Then, add in snow plowing, which forces parked vehicles off the street in as little as half a day’s notice.
And even when the streets are plowed, parking your car is precarious. In the neighbourhood I lived in, streets sloped downwards toward the sidewalk to assist with drainage.
But one unintended consequence is that these roads turned into lightly-graded hills that made it impossible for smaller cars to pull out into the centre of the road when it was icy.
Once you parked your car, you could be trapped there. Finally, there’s the construction. It arises at any time for arbitrary reasons, and it can obliterate your ability to park in a neighbourhood for months. And it arrives as a surprise.
So add all that together, and you have the recipe for a true parking hell, my friends.
You haven’t experienced a parking ‘problem’ until you’ve driven around for half an hour while being cussed at in French, given up in despair, parked your car a 20-minute walk away from your destination, only to return to find a windshield stuffed with arbitrary parking violation tickets or your vehicle towed (and still found to be stuffed with arbitrary parking violation tickets.)
In Squamish, however, I can find parking in about five minutes, tops.
