https://twitter.com/joeboughner/status/648986693576622080
https://twitter.com/KellyEganColumn/status/648998027152240640
Kelly Egan writes in the Ottawa Citizen about overcrowding at OC Transpo’s Eagleson park-and-ride, the city’s plan for a new lot at the corner of Innovation Drive and Terry Fox Drive in Kanata North, near the Richcraft Recreation Complex:
Cars are regularly being ticketed around the park-and-ride on Eagleson Road at the Queensway, an alert reader tells us, evidence of a transit policy that suffers its success.
The lot can hold 1,216 cars and, apparently, is not expandable. Cars are leaking onto the closest streets, like Hearst Way, and the lots of nearby businesses, which is hardly a tenable, long-term solution. Complaints come in, bylaw goes out, tickets fly.
“We know on any given day,” says Kanata South Coun. Allan Hubley, “there were 40 to 100 cars parked illegally in the area.”
…
So the city’s response is to proceed with a new park-and-ride at Terry Fox and Innovation drives, about six kilometres northwest. It’s to open in the fall of 2016 and Phase 1 will have room for 300 or so cars. It will cost $8.3 million. This excludes the $5.7 million for the land. Yes, that makes $14 million, or $47,000 per spot, given away free to the user.
…
Hubley had another idea, which can’t seem to catch on. The Canadian Tire Centre has parking lots for something like 6,500 cars. There is a small park-and-ride there for 100 vehicles. The rest, at least during the daytime hours, is a windblown tarmac where the Space Shuttle could land.