Want to talk about parking? Of course you don’t. Who wants to waste time on mundanities? But if you live anywhere near Dundas between Roncy and Dovercourt, you’re going to have trouble avoiding it.
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Here, small business owners are at the end of a one-year experiment allowing on-?street parking during rush periods, and councillor and TTC chair Adam Giambrone wants it to end.
While next week’s final decision is in the hands of council, posters have sprouted like crocuses in shop windows, depicting Giambrone in a parody of the famous Obama poster with the words “Our neighbourhoods are destinations, not highways.”
What could get people worked up into a revolutionary froth over temporary parking spots? It’s not just the cortados at Cafe Brasiliano. Sylvia Draper ?Fernandez of the Dundas West BIA believes that for businesses catering to the local Portuguese population, it’s about cultural sensitivity.
The construction trade, she says, remains central to this neighbourhood. “From 5 to 10 am, our street is lined with construction vehicles. People come in, get a coffee, talk about work and soccer. It’s a focal point. A lot of the services are geared to that community.”
And you can’t haul lumber on the 505, Metropass or not.
Merchants in the struggling ‘hood look to College or Roncesvalles, both flourishing and flush with parking. “Why is the Portuguese community any different from the Italian or Polish?” she asks.
Ah, there’s my west side. Now, if only someone would mention the Lombardi family. “Try taking parking from College,” she says. “We think the deputy mayor [Joe Pantalone] and the Lombardis would have something to say.”
Dundas was once a provincial highway, meaning locals missed out on the ample parking they associate with Little Italy’s success. If College had to float that idea today, it would get the same reception it’s getting on Dundas. The prevailing wisdom is that parking in the core should be hard to get.
That’s in order to give streetcars free and easy access. But as Giambrone notes, when there’s a blockage on the rails, getting transit vehicles moving again takes a major effort. “The problem with a streetcar network is that it can take a long time to resolve a problem a bad situation can just get worse.”
But here’s the larger dilemma: in freeing up those parking lanes and giving streetcars more mobility, the city could be turning the street into a speedy rush-hour thoroughfare. More traffic travelling more quickly? To that extent, local shopkeepers have a point.
Still, the year-long Dundas rush-hour parking pilot, the only major route that has had parking added recently, allowed TTC staff to compare differences in streetcar travel times with and without parking. They found that rush-hour parking increased travel time on streetcars by one minute and 20 seconds going west and three minutes eastbound for travel across Ward 18. Reason enough, says Giambrone, to clear the lanes for the rat race.
But for locals trying to reclaim Dundas from its history as a highway, that idea is strange. Hence the popularity of the poster.
On its side, the BIA credits parking with fewer storefront vacancies last year, ignoring that fact that high rents on College, Queen and Roncy have brought an influx of merchants and foot traffic.
“Oh, of course, [foot traffic is] what we’re trying to encourage,” says Draper Hernandez. “And TTC is an option for the newer community moving in, students and young professionals. But we should be able to share the street.”
Giambrone hopes he’s found a way staff have devised a compromise that would allow rush-?hour parking mid-?block and bar it round the clock close to intersections with traffic lights.
“We would use this compromise in areas like Little Italy,” he adds. This isn’t just about Ward 18.”
“We’d be happy to work on a compromise,” says Draper Hernandez. “But we haven’t seen anything. We haven’t been consulted.” And she doesn’t like what she hears.
What kind of compromise would the BIA prefer? She says she wants the same influence over parking that other BIA’s have. That’s… not actually a compromise. But then, a fight about parking is rarely actually a fight about parking.
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