Boulevard parking pilot program could alleviate overnight winter parking issues in St. Thomas, Ont.

Too many cars, and not enough driveway parking.

It’s becoming a major problem in cities seeing an increase multi-generational homes, and greater residential density.

St. Thomas, Ont. resident Brad Hansen currently has the issue of three vehicles in his residence, but not enough places to park them.

“If we could park one of our vehicles on the boulevard and actually not get in trouble for doing it, it would take a lot of the cars off the road,” said Hansen.

Come winter, he would be ticketed by the city for parking on the street when snow removal vehicles need to be able to plow the roads.

The city is now attempting to alleviate the problem by beginning the Lower Driveway Boulevard Parking Pilot Program.

“We thought it might provide some options to those residents that have parking issues, but also have boulevard space,” said Kevin De Leebeeck, director of infrastructure and environmental services with the City of St. Thomas.

St. Thomas residents may soon be able to park overnight on their boulevard in winter to avoid getting a ticket on city streets (Brent Lale/CTV News London)

“We know new development is becoming more dense and we have multiple multi-generational families, and the housing units are smaller themselves, but everyone still has their vehicles. This is a potential solution to help alleviate those concerns.”

The goal with boulevard parking is to avoid cars hanging over the sidewalk which would create barriers for pedestrians, while also ensuring that parked vehicles stay off the road creating obstacles for traffic.

The city of Cambridge had this program when De Leebeeck was their city engineer.

“We had pretty good uptake,” he said. “I think we had about 20 or 30 streets that up took this program right away. I could see the same thing, perhaps a smaller scale here.”

This two-year pilot program is limited to a maximum of ten streets per year and will be implemented on a street-by-street application basis.

The catch is the applicant must convince 51 per cent of property owners along the street to sign in support.

A City of St. Thomas diagram shows an example of the Lower Boulevard Pilot Parking Program (Source: City of St. Thomas)

“The first step is to gauge whether the rest of the street feels the same way as the applicant that's organizing,” said De Leebeeck. “The second process is for the city staff, to go out there to make sure - the biggest piece for us is making sure that the width of the boulevard, it satisfies the three meters.”

While this parking program could work for a small percentage of residents with boulevards of the required size, others have no solution for winter parking concerns.

“We don't have boulevards, so we can't apply for it, but for years, we've been trying to get them to do something about the parking,” said Tanya Rawcliffe who lives on Schreyer Dr.

Rawcliffe lives on what the city refers to as a tertiary street, and it rarely gets plowed in winter. However, she still isn’t allowed to park on the street during snow season.

She is just asking for a little leeway from the city, “When we put in our concrete driveway, we want to expand our driveway three feet over just to take up a little bit more space and have steps up, but they won't let you because you have to have so much green space in your front yard,” said Rawcliffe.

St. Thomas residents may soon be able to park overnight on their boulevard in winter to avoid getting a ticket on city streets (Brent Lale/CTV News London)

She also said that while she understands the street needs to be clear for snow removal vehicles, with the lack of snow the past few years, she’d like to be able to either park on the street or expand her driveway.

“There is no wiggle room to have any extra green space and to have extra driveway so we could park two cars beside each other.”

De Leebeeck understands her concerns, but said “We don't necessarily have a full solution for those parking issues at this point in time, but we're slowly making progress of where we can.”

Application forms for the program can be found on the overnight parking section of the city website.