My neighbour leaned out his window, called down to where I sat far below: “How’s it going?”
I replied by waving a newspaper. “Says here that city council wants to fix the downtown parking shortage by changing parking rates.”
He shook his head. “The problem isn’t the rates, it’s the loss of parking spots. Got high-rises going up where the lots used to be. Fixing that by tweaking parking rates is like fixing a famine by changing the prices at McDonald’s.”
I nodded politely, but changed the subject. “Will you be pulling out soon? I can’t leave until you do.” We were jammed side by side in a parkade, I in a little Times Colonist car, he in a vehicle the size of your first apartment.
This is the real parking problem when you drive a small car. Inevitably it gets boxed in by something much larger. It’s like coming back to the parkade and finding yourself docked in the lee of an aircraft carrier, one that blocks your vision as you reverse out of the stall. Think of backing into a bar fight blind.
Sometimes the gap between vehicles is so tight that you can’t even open your door. That’s the way it was on this day, when I found my car side-mirror-to-hubcap with an SUV that appeared to be a cross between a large Cadillac Escalade and a small Gulf Island. (You know the ones: Back-up cameras, heated steering wheel, hot tub, helipad, crew of five.) His wheels had inched over my side of the line the way the Russian army inched into Ukraine. The only way I was getting into my car was A) by losing the Christmas shortbread weight or B) squeezing through the sunroof. TC cars don’t have sunroofs.
This is the crux of the problem: The vehicles we drive have become too big for the spaces in which we park them. The length, height and width of automobiles has grown (as has, not coincidentally, the width of the people inside them,) but the off-street stalls have not. (In Victoria, for example, the minimum size remains 2.6 metres wide by 5.1 deep. A bit tight, just like last year’s shorts.)
Meanwhile, more cars are crowding into parking lots. ICBC registered 3.2 million automobile policies in 2015, up 10 per cent in four years. That’s a 10 per cent increase in vehicles, all of which are longer than War and Peace, higher than Seth Rogen and wider than a salesman’s smile, improved safety features having added to their girth. Today’s drivers like their vehicles big: Seven of the 10 top-sellers in Canada in 2015 were SUVs, vans or trucks, the latter built tough enough to haul logging equipment or a freshly killed moose through the rugged back roads of Broadmead.
Inevitably, we bash into one another. ICBC says it handles claims for 120,000 parking lot collisions a year, including 4,300 in which someone is injured or killed.
Two years ago, a CTV News analysis revealed that while the overall number of Lower Mainland crashes had remained fairly stable between 1996 and 2013, parking-related collisions had risen disproportionately, climbing to the point that they made up 48 per cent of all car-accident claims in the area.
This is not just a Canadian thing. In November, a British report showed U.K. parking lot crashes had risen by one-third in two years, the increase blamed on cars outgrowing their stalls. In Switzerland, the same problem has authorities looking to redesign parking lots.
Me, I hope the authorities consider short-car-only parking spots with access denied to anything over shoulder height, which would solve the obscured-vision issue.
Now, signage alone wouldn’t keep big vehicles out of these spaces, just as it doesn’t keep them out of small-car-only slots (apparently some drivers define “small” as any vehicle without a greyhound painted on the side). Builders would have to enforce the short-car rule with physical barriers — five-foot ceilings, perhaps, or head-high strands of barbed wire. This would leave sedan drivers crawling out of their cars on their hands and knees, but I think they would still be on board with the idea.
It wouldn’t ease Victoria’s parking space shortage, though. In fact, any redesign of parkades and lots would probably involve increasing the size of spaces, which would reduce their overall number.
Of course, it would also help if people left their cars at home. You first.
