Free parking in core business districts thrown a lifeline by council

Parking meters as seen in London, Ont. on April 1, 2024. (Daryl Newcombe/CTV News London)

A day after a popular free parking program expired, council left the door open to reviving a scaled-back version in London’s core business districts.

Separate motions by Coun. David Ferreira and Coun. Susan Stevenson sought a continuation of free parking in Downtown London and the Old East Village, respectively.

Both councillors warned that a return to full-price parking will be a barrier to attracting customers to the struggling commercial districts.

Since 2021, typing the ‘CORE’ promo code into the Honk Mobile App provided up to two hours of free parking in the core-area as an economic recovery tool to help business districts still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Council initially funded the promo code as part of a core area pandemic recovery program.

On Tuesday, council directed city staff to prepare a report about the cost, revenue impact, and potential funding source for:

• 1 hour free on-street parking in the downtown and OEV
• resumption of the free parking promo code in two municipal lots in OEV

The report will be considered at the next meeting of the Community and Protective Services Committee.

"If we can find a reasonable source of funding, I'll support doing that for this year,” said Deputy Mayor Shawn Lewis. “To me this is a step back from the overall program, and I want to continue to step back from it, because at some point parking needs to pay for parking."

Ferreira said in the meantime, there will be several weeks of full-price parking to assess the impact on merchants.

"We need to know how we are going to be able to pay for this. Just to be able to pay the transaction fees is 35 cents per transaction on the Honk App,” Ferreira told CTV News. “We need to know how we are going to pay for it. We need to know what our revenue projections will be with that free parking."

However, Coun. Skylar Franke did not support the possibility of an extension.

She’s worried one extension will lead to more, “I'm not entirely confident that extending this will only occur one time. I could actually see it occurring many times because I'm sure people enjoy having taxpayer subsidized parking."