Editor: My wife and I visited your town on the weekend of Jan. 9 to help my daughter move into a new condo. We were loading boxes in and out of vehicles all day, from one location to the other. In order to move the contents of her apartment, we required the use of the alley.
After unloading the car, I was waiting for the other members of my family to be ready to continue.
This was not a long wait, but when I returned I found a ticket on my windshield. Apparently I was parked in a fire lane, and was therefore entitled to a $50 ticket.
There was no visible signage from where I had parked my car, but after investigating further, I found that there was indeed a sign posted at the entrance of the lane, fairly high up, easy to miss if you were trying to find something at street level.
I decided to investigate the neighbourhood a little bit, to see how parking was in the area, and felt that I should write this letter.
I paid my ticket promptly. This is not so much a dispute about money, but rather the morality of development permits and parking enforcement that is employed by the City of 91原创.
As I strolled around my daughter鈥檚 neighbourhood I found that every linear foot of curb was completely filled by cars. The condos in the area had virtually no parking. Another thing I noticed was that there were sides of the street that had posted 鈥渘o parking鈥� signs that had vehicles parked at them whenever the resident knew bylaw enforcement was not present.
I feel that this is indicative of a larger problem in any area where population pressures are increasing.
The population of 91原创 is increasing, so developers want to build condominiums to allow more people to live there. The developers do not want to provide adequate parking facilities. Even if the condominiums have parking available it is not adequate to meet the demand placed on the neighbourhood.
There are no 鈥渧isitor鈥� parking spaces available at the complex, so the demand must be met by street-side parking. There is far more demand than could be possibly filled by the supply of parking spots, which leads to people parking illegally.
The City of 91原创 then employs bylaw enforcement officers to ticket these parking infractions.
One bylaw enforcement officer doesn鈥檛 have to find that many infractions to make up their salary, with the balance of the tickets given being profit to the City of 91原创.
This strikes me as being a very immoral practice, and one that all citizens should be outraged by.
Henry Ortynski,
Powell River
