Stephen Vance, Editor
Meaford’s council had a lengthy and lively debate this week about whether to implement a pay for overnight parking system for the relatively few downtown apartment dwellers who own cars, but don’t have a parking spot included with their apartments.
All members of council offered their opinions, and asked excellent questions, and there were some valid points raised on all sides of an issue where nobody is exactly wrong in their views.
After all, it’s not the tenants’ fault that their downtown apartment doesn’t include a parking space, and it’s no secret that this is a tough town to find an apartment to rent to begin with, so if a renter finds an apartment above one of the downtown businesses and it doesn’t include a parking spot, but the landlord informs that traditionally tenants have parked their cars in Market Square or in another municipally owned parking lot, you can’t blame the renter for snapping up the apartment, and parking their vehicle as instructed.
It’s also not the fault of the property owners that their century-old, downtown buildings have little to no parking available. Many of these buildings were constructed before there were even cars to park, and the long-practised custom has been for the tenants with vehicles to park in a few downtown municipal lots which are mostly empty in the overnight hours, or on the street in the summer months when snow removal isn’t a concern.
At the same time, municipal staff are not wrong to note that there are costs associated with maintaining parking spots, so why should renters be able to park in those spots for free when other residents park in their driveways or in the parking lot of their apartment buildings? We have, after all, asked our municipal government to find ways to cut costs, or increase revenues in order to help keep property tax increases to a minimum.
My own perspective on the issue is that I can’t see it being worth the trouble, the complaints, and the cost of enforcement for what municipal staff themselves say will only generate $3,000 to $5,000 per year in revenues.
During the discussion around the council table I was reminded of an article I had read earlier this year in Mother Jones magazine that spoke to a much different problem that will be encountered by municipalities in the coming years – too much parking.
Our love affair with the automobile has had a good run, but all signs are pointing to its end thanks to an indifference to driving by the millennial generation, and the fast-approaching infestation of self-driving automobiles that will likely result in far, far fewer automobiles on our roads in the decades to come. In fact, car use is already on the decline in many larger urban centres.
“In the ’60s, car use grew by 42 percent. In the ’80s, it grew by less – only 23 percent. Then from 1995 to 2005 it went up by only five percent. In some cities car use actually declined, including London (down 1.2 percent), Atlanta (10.1 percent), and Houston (15.2 percent),” informed the article No Parking Here, by Clive Thomson, published in the January/February issue.
The article also noted that millennials are practically running away from automobiles. According to the article, and some other resources I found on the ‘Google machine’ when I was doing some further reading this past winter, the number of miles driven annually by 18 to 34 year olds has dropped by nearly 25 percent in the past decade, and many in that generation don’t even bother to get a driver’s licence these days. In 1983 nearly 90 percent of 19 year olds in America had a driver’s licence, but by 2010 that number had dropped to less than 70 percent and that rate is continuing to decline.
Even the president of the Toyota corporation recently conceded that “we have to face the growing reality that today’s young people don’t seem to be as interested in cars as previous generations.”
As the father of a teenager, I can attest to that. My older teenager has expressed no desire to drive, and he only begrudgingly went through the process to obtain his G1 licence more than a year after he was eligible, yet when I was a teenager, I barely let the calendar flip to my 16th birthday before I was in the MTO office to get my hands on the much coveted ‘365’ learner’s permit. By the time I was 17 I (as did most of my friends) had my own car. My sons and their friends though seem to have little to no desire to drive.
Add to the decline in interest of the 18 to 34 year old generation, the fast approaching availability of self-driving cars (seriously, they will be here before we know it), and the future needs for parking in the downtown cores of cities and towns will seriously decline.
Depending on your school of thought, the self-driving cars will either be mostly corporately owned for services like Uber who will be able to send a driverless car to pick you up and drop you off, no parking spot needed at home, work, or the mall, or, as some others envision, many of those vehicles will be privately owned by commuters who will be able to eat their breakfast and watch cartoons as their car drives them to work, and then the vehicle can simply be told to return home, or to some other location until it is needed at the end of the day. The most likely scenario will be a mix of uses for these driverless vehicles.
Either way, the need for parking spaces in the coming years is sure to decline. Some experts are suggesting that in just 15 years, those autonomous vehicles will eliminate the need for up to 90 percent of the currently existing parking spaces, while more conservative experts suggest that perhaps 50 percent of current parking spaces will become surplus.
The parking-related question for future councils might very well be what to do with all those empty parking spaces, so why start ‘nickle and diming’ over a few downtown parking spots now? Why not plan for, and promote, carpooling and alternate means of transportation now, while we await the transformation that is to come with the introduction self-driving cars?
