Parking in Waterloo Region

[MidTowner]

The three hour limit is something that I find really annoying. It dissuades people who own cars and park on the street from occasionally making use of public transit or active transportation (since you could get home at 5:00pm and find a ticket on your car windshield); and, like most parking restrictions, it encourages more private parking (if your on-street parking is inconvenient, you may eventually decide it's worth your while to widen your driveway, paving over more landscaped area and maybe even removing on-street parking which can be used much more effectively).

Last year, Kitchener City Council voted (on a pilot basis- ugh) to stop enforcing the three-hour limit overnight during the non-winter months. I believe that's expired. They had a pilot in ward five to allow boulevard parking (which should be a no-brainer if your boulevard happens to have the space for it), but that was not extended elsewhere. The amount of times that Kitchener Council has considered this and related issues the last couple of years is ridiculous. A few real gems of logic have been presented by several councillors- that boulevard parking or on-street parking is somehow "unsightly," that "abandoned" cars are undesireable, so on and on.

Blanket bans like the "no three hour parking on any street under any circumstances" are asinine. Because they're hard to enforce, they wind up being a way for neighbours to use city resources in their own feuds; and they ignore the fact that older and newer neighbourhoods have vastly different dynamics. Our council obviously has no understanding of the value of on-street parking, and would prefer that all neighbourhoods consist of single-family homes with double-wide driveways and two-car garages. Fortunately, many of our neighbourhoods do not look like that, and the parking bylaws should accommodate the realities there.