Parking problems brewing in city
By Letter to the Editor on June 9, 2021.
Editor:
Every adult is beginning to own a car or a pick-up truck. I hope it’s the sign of an affluent and happy community. I guess we should celebrate it. However, I can see a battle brewing. It’s parking.
I look around my neighbourhood and see the cars parked on the street. It looks like each household has two or more cars or pick-up trucks. Furthermore, it seems very few people use the garage for cars. Garage is mostly storage space. It means cars are on the street. So there is no space for guests. Lethbridge is increasingly looking like other big cities. Should we be ruled by a stricter regime like them?
My daughter and family live in Toronto. When they lived downtown, they had a long battle with the City Hall to have their car park on the street in front of their house. Only after a long battle with city bureaucracy did they got a permit sticker to park in front of their own home only because he was a family doctor. I didn’t own a car in Toronto for 11 years.
In Japan, both in the city and the countryside, you can not even purchase a vehicle unless you show proof of space on your own or rental property. When you are a visitor, you can park only on the marked street parking spots, otherwise you walk some distance for public pay parking. That’s why many people take bus or train.
A former classmate of mine was a professor at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He lived in a professor’s apartment within the campus next to Columbia University. He never owned a car. When he began to feel the age to take public transportation for grocery or ramen dinner, he switched to taxi. He added up the taxi fares and compared it with the cost of owning a reasonably priced car like a Honda Civic. He included gas, insurance, parking fees, maintenance, and the price of a car itself plus depreciation. He concluded that car ownership cost about twice as much as the total of taxi fares.
We are facing a similar possibility in Lethbridge now. A battle is brewing in my neighbourhood. What do we do?
Tadashi (Tad) Mitsui
Lethbridge
-1
You’re right about the parking problems. Almost every “snout- house” with a front garage has the garage overstuffed with junk, there is no room for even a Smart car. The result is more cars parked on the street.
And obviously it’s junk we don’t use or need.
That’s similar to the “junk drawer” everyone seems to have in their kitchen. lol