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Old Posted May 23, 2018, 6:49 PM
Taeolas Taeolas is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Fredericton
Posts: 3,963
One of Moncton's biggest problems as well, is that while it has a lot of surface parking, a lot (if not the majority of it) is private reserved parking. Which means that visitors to downtown need to look for needles in a haystack trying to find a safe parking spot in a sea of dangerous ones. (made extra difficult if the visitor is from out of town and/or out of province and not familiar with the area).

Ideally, a city should NOT have much private parking, for residents or for workers. Workers should be using transit to go to and from work, and leaving their vehicles at home. Downtown residents ideally should be more transit oriented as well and not own their own vehicles in the first place.

That would leave the actual parking downtown open and available for visitors, for the people who don't (or can't reasonably) use transit but have business in the downtown area. And their parking options should be obvious and somewhat convenient across downtown. Parking garages help in this respect, by providing a lot of parking in key points across the downtown fabric, ready to accept visitors and be handy to the businesses. This is one thing Fredericton's downtown garages manage to do; they're spread out across the downtown enough that if all surface parking were removed, most places are still only a block or so away from a public garage.

For Moncton, as noted, they have a public parking problem at the moment, and that realization seems to only now be sinking in with the city council. Building a garage near the events centre would solve multiple problems; by providing handy public parking to the centre, and beginning to shift and concentrate parking options in the core. It does also need to be combined with transit shifts and other projects, but it would still be a key component that will be needed sooner rather than later.
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