The Town of Sidney is beginning work on implementing some of the recommendations from its recently completed 2022 downtown parking study, some of which could result in significant changes to the parking experience in the downtown core and surrounding residential areas.
At a March 13 meeting, council approved five operational recommendations from staff while deferring several more significant recommendations to allow for additional debate. The approved recommendations include implementing consistent parking time restrictions, increasing targeted enforcement on high parking duration blocks, consolidate passenger pickup and drop-off zones, retain three-hour parking restrictions in off-street parking lots, and enhance parking way finding signage.
“We think these are good recommendations and now staff can operationalize those and put them into their work plans,” said Mayor Cliff McNeil-Smith.
Council also approved a direction to staff to start working on two additional recommendations and then seek input from the Saanich Peninsula Accessibility Advisory Committee. Those recommendations which staff will now work on include adopting accessible on-street parking design standards, plus increasing the supply of accessible parking stalls and commercial loading zones.
READ MORE: Sidney budget balances below-inflation tax increase with more community funding: mayor
“We already have accessible parking stalls, and there is a design standard for them, but those standards evolve, and staff need to review them, and now that we have this tri-municipality committee - they will review it and provide feedback before any changes are made,” said McNeil-Smith.
With its third resolution related to the study during the meeting, council approved a direction that some of the more significant recommendations from the study be brought back to a future committee of the whole meeting for more discussion. The thought is they would likely have larger impacts on the community, should council ultimately choose to endorse them, and community input would be needed.
Those include exploring a residential parking permit program for the residential areas closest to the downtown core, considering allowing overnight parking at existing town-owned parking lots, considering the removal of parking stall delineation markings as they have not been maintained consistently, and considering implementing one-hour parking restrictions on some of the area’s busier streets which don’t already have parking restrictions.
Perhaps the most significant topic to be discussed further would be whether or not to implement paid parking on Beacon Avenue, which would eliminate free parking on the town’s busiest shopping corridor and require the purchase of related equipment to handle that change.
The final resolution passed by council was to ask staff and WATT Consulting Group, which produced the study, to further refine the data to look at potential impacts of proposed bike lanes on Bevan Avenue and Fifth Street, which feature in the current draft of the Active Transportation Plan and have already proved somewhat controversial in the community.
Downtown parking studies are conducted every five years in Sidney as outlined in the town’s Official Community Plan. McNeil-Smith said the raw data on parking utilization in the 2022 study was not significantly different than the previous study in 2016, so the recommendations set out in the report are focused mostly on refining the specific details of how parking is organized in the downtown core and near by residential areas.
READ MORE: Sidney’s draft active transportation plan could disrupt parking
@JSamanski
justin.samanski-langille@goldstreamgazette.com
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.