While I am sympathetic to the need for more parking in downtown St. Albert, and am supportive of the pilot project, I am not optimistic for its success. Yes, it provides additional well needed parking spots in the downtown but it creates additional problems with traffic flow through the downtown.
Yes, I recognize that downtown merchants desire that traffic slows down so they can take note of the downtown businesses and perhaps even stop and shop, but in the interests of the greater community it is necessary to preserve adequate traffic flow.
There are currently only two streets (St. Anne and Perron) that connect the southwest sector of St. Albert – Grandin, Heritage Lakes and Riel, to the shopping districts along St. Albert Trail north, and vice versa. The only other options are to use St. Albert Trail, which is horrendously busy, to proceed along Sir Winston Churchill under the trail and encounter three school zones, or alternatively to take the circuitous route along Ray Gibbon Drive (another horrendously busy thoroughfare).
St. Anne and Perron are exasperated by the very successful farmers’ market on Saturdays throughout the summer. The farmers’ market requires the total closure of St. Anne Street and creates a virtual parking lot on Perron Street from one end to the other every Saturday.
In past years the issue of egress out of the downtown core has been examined with no apparent solutions. A proposal for a connection onto the trail at Sir Winston Churchill was found to be unfeasible due to traffic configurations and safety.
The ultimate solution to the parking dilemma is to advance the DARP proposal for a parking structure on the south end of the existing St. Albert Place parking lot. An interim solution, which would create the same number of parking stalls as the angle parking pilot project, would be to remove the St. Albert Place staff parking, freeing it up for public use. This may seem like an extreme solution to city employees, however. When that parking lot was originally opened it was specifically designed for public parking. St. Albert Place staff was required to park in the parking lot between the seniors’ centre and the curling rink, a very short stroll from St. Albert Place.
Hopefully, the employees of downtown merchants will not monopolize the downtown parking or we will end up with parking meters which have been unpopular in the past. To their credit, downtown merchants on the west side of Perron have a small number of parking stalls behind their premises, paid for by them in a re-subdivision a number of years ago when the lane was moved to the west at their expense.
Anyway, this is a pilot project – let’s make the best of it for a year and at the end of the test period make an objective analysis of the feedback as well as the safety and traffic statistics. By then traffic will no doubt have increased even further and we can proceed with the ultimate solution – a parking structure.
Ken Allred is a former St. Albert alderman and MLA
