Editor:
More Banffites should take the trouble to read the Town’s Transportation Master Plan (Bunt & Associates; August 2013), readily available on the Town’s website.
While it is over 300 pages, with schedules, it’s a fascinating read and filled with useful suggestions to mitigate our increasingly critical traffic and parking headaches.
This study, including its recommendations regarding paid parking, was endorsed by Mayor Sorensen at last autumn’s election and by all councillors who ran for re-election at that time. Candidates who vociferously opposed parking fees were resoundingly defeated, with one exception.
In 1911, when the first automobiles visited Banff (150 of them that year) the population of Calgary approximated 50,000. That number is presently approaching 1.2 million and in that period the footprint of Banff has not expanded and we’ve added no more than a few hundred metres of residential roadways to that footprint. There’s no reason to suppose Calgary’s growth will not continue and that growth is the major factor in our present problem.
In their background studies for the transportation plan, our engineering consultants established baseline traffic counts above which parking shortages and traffic jams reach critical levels. Since late June, that level has been regularly exceeded; notably by a margin of more than 50 per cent on the Aug. 1 weekend.
Even in this early stage of this initiative, it’s obvious that the “paid parking” lots are regularly filled and it’s apparent that there is a substantial portion of the public that’s perfectly happy to pay for the convenience of street level parking in downtown Banff. I’m unable to think of a reason for us to deny them that privilege.
No doubt there will be a few more Canmore commuters who will choose to use the admirably efficient new commuter bus and perhaps a few locals who will choose to walk or bike to work; a reasonable and effective response to changing circumstance.
The history of human progress is one of such effective adaptation to changing circumstance and reasonable fees are merely a common and effective partial solution to what is obviously excess demand for our very limited parking facilities.
It’s certainly not a drastic or unusual solution; almost all Canadian cities (including relatively small ones, like those of the Okanagan Valley) and significant resort areas (Whistler, Niagara Falls) include parking fees in their transportation plans and, as Ben Berci has pointed out, it’s plainly irresponsible for the Town to forego this obvious source of revenue. Not to mention the cost of maintaining and cleaning public parking structures and lots.
There will always be a certain segment of the populace who have difficulty adapting to change and who are bereft of the capacity to contribute useful suggestions. I commend our mayor and council for their initiative and willingness to consider and pursue solutions to our obvious problems and echo Walter Bagehot in exhorting them to continue to “take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”
Gord Rathbone,
Banff
