Re: Motorcycle parking fees on hold for now
How is dedicating spots to motorcycles any different than losing revenue from a car to a motorcycle, as you mentioned? If you dedicate spots to bikes, that means 100% of the time a car cannot park there, and there's a good chance no bike will be there either, so it's just empty. Without dedicated spots, 100% of the available parking space is technically available to cars
The only ways the city will NOT lose on dedicated spots are to:
- make too few spaces for the actual demand so that the occupancy rate of the spots is extremely high, OR
- create new spaces at the front and back of already demarcated street parking zones
Otherwise all of their estimates are incorrect as they do not account for the opportunity cost of lost revenue from full size vehicles which would have parked in those zones if/when there were no bikes there.
There is also as assumption that the introduction of paid motorcycle parking will have no effect on usage. If I'm going to have to pay $10 to park my bike for the day downtown, I may decide that I will bring my car and pay slightly more but have mitigate against bad weather.
In Montreal you are supposed to park bikes (for free) just outside the car parking zones. There though they have actual marked spaces for full size vehicles and you pay electronically according to your parking spot number. There though they seem to ignore bikes parked right up to the cross-street, perhaps due to the pervasiveness of one-way streets and the no-right-on-red. In general the city of Montreal seems to allow bikes a lot of latitude for parking as they truly do seem to want to encourage usage.
The first big red herring in their report is the attempt to tie illegal parking to the lack of demarcated parking. There is an assertion that illegal parking would decrease, as it had in Calgary, with the introduction of dedicated parking zones. As far as I know Calgary did not have free motorcycle parking before the introduction of dedicated spots, so therefore the motivator for illegal parking there may have been to avoid paying full vehicle rates. In Toronto, if there are not enough spaces to fit demand (which is by the Toronto staff report far greater than 500) or if the prices are not acceptable, you are likely to see an INCREASE on non-compliance, are you not?
The second red herring is the lack of any evidence that the promotion of motorcycle usage has resulted in a permanent change in behaviour which is adequate to meet the cities goals to reign in gridlock and reduce environmental impact.
I wonder if the scooter riders are going mental right now: they have gone from parking on the boulevard for free to getting shoved into traffic and forced to pay. That's an even bigger pill to swallow methinks.
