Decades ago I had a conversation with then UBC Transportation Director, Gordon Lovegrove, in the old Student Union Building. He was staffing a table announcing a transportation vision of some sort (the details of which I forget). I do recall him telling me about UBC’s goal to get students out of cars and into busses. I countered that the only reason to do so was to build up the campus residential community who would all have cars and drive them. With more people living on campus there would be more local residential traffic. Not true Gord responded. Gord and others affiliated with UBC’ Campus and Community Planning went on to spearhead the U-Pass system for students. That shifted student traffic into public transit without actually reducing overall vehicle traffic levels.
Reducing personal vehicle trips to campus by students was critical in UBC’s late 1990s plan to intensify residential development and monetize empty land (like the former B Lot Parking, now Hawthorn Place). The planners and developers knew full well that Metro Vancouver (who prior to 2010 was responsible for approving UBC’s Land Use Plan) would not look kindly upon UBC expanding density and having spill over car traffic overwhelming Marine Drive, Point Grey, and Dunbar neighbourhoods. A key part of the solution to hold traffic flows down was to shift students (and as many faculty and staff as possible) into buses. Public transit was a tool to free development potential on UBC’s Point Grey campus.
B lot Development - Hawthorn Place
As Hampton Place development was approaching maximum buildout campus developers and their allies turned attention toward the large surface parking lot known as B Lot. The Mid Campus Neighbourhood Plan was adopted in the fall of 2001, but already two faculty/staff rental buildings had been built in the north west corner of the large parking lot (my family and I were part of the first residents of the Hawthorn Lane townhouses).
The Mid Campus Plan referenced parking 52 times. Some representative examples (emphasis added):
“Roads are designed to restrict vehicle speeds and enhance the pedestrian realm, and on-street parking also acts as traffic calming” (page 5).
“In order to diminish the perceived width of local roadways, driving aisle surfaces will be asphalt and parking surfaces a patterned concrete or pavers. Curb extensions and extensive landscaping will be used in order to create “pockets” of parking” (page 14).
“Underground or covered off-street parking is generally required for new buildings within this neighbourhood. On street parking is also available for resident and visitor use by means of a permit. The extent to which on-street parking may be used as part of the parking allocation for each site will be determined by the Development Permit, and will depend on the extent of adjacent street frontage and other factors. A primary element of this neighbourhood will be its reduced reliance on automobile use. Vehicular parking standards will comply with the CCP and the Strategic Transportation Plan, and shall not exceed the maximum standards in those documents. The standards for market residential units are further reduced in this neighbourhood, to reflect the smaller unit sizes which are likely to be provided, and to ensure that parking ratios are related to unit size” (page 23).
Even though the plan had one mention of a parking permit system, no details were provided. Eight years after the approval of the neighbourhood plan, UBC’s entire parking system collapsed and the university faced a court order to pay back parking violation fees. UBC got out of that pickle when the BC Government revised the legislation governing UBC’s authority to ticket and tow. Yet, the fix for UBC’s academic lands didn’t cover the residential areas which ended up under the jurisdiction of BC’s Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure (MoTI). The UNA, working with UBC Properties Trust, was nominally responsible for parking in the University Neighbourhood areas but lacked any legal or jurisdictional authority to do anything about it.
One long time Hampton Place resident and strata chair shared this comment with me via email.
“As Chair of [a Strata Council] I started asking UBC several decades ago to enforce on-street parking in the vicinity of our building . The early responses from Al Poettcker and others at UBC Properties Trust was that this was a provincial jurisdiction matter; however, the province and the RCMP both referred it back to UBC. So, as a result, there has never been enforcement or on-street parking rules that I am aware of in OVER 20 YEARS of living here. People just park everywhere they want to in our area of Hampton Place, in contravention of the posted rules. Why have signs indicating parking restrictions, if they will never be enforced? We have given up trying to get issues enforced. I'm not sure what the situation is closer to the UBC sports fields at the west end of Hampton Place, but I have heard from others that on-street parking there is also a contentious issue.”
I served on the UNA Board of Directors from 2012-2016. Parking regulation was one of the ongoing and perennial issues in front of the board in those years. MoTI personnel jealously guarded their quiet backroom personas and were reluctant to meet or talk with elected UNA Directors, referring us instead to UBC’s Campus and Community Planning. UBC told us it was out of their hands. Like the Strata Chair quoted above we found our selves punted back and forth with no effective capacity to act. But act we did, and it seems the potential of us introducing our own parking policy resulted in UBC and MoTI sitting down with the UNA. Out of that meeting eventually came the current style of no ticket, only tow, parking management system.
Parking problems
When the community was small - only two buildings on Hawthorn Lane- most parking issues were fairly simple. UBC Properties Trust (this was in the years prior to the establishment of the UNA) tried to put meter parking into play, but community pushback held the meters at bay. As Hawthorn built out, however, parking issues became more complex.
Two conflicting values coalesced to generated greater support for regulated parking: UBC’s desire to reduce parking availability and resident upset at increasingly difficulties finding places for their own and their visitors’ cars. UBC has used planning principles that assume building fewer parking spaces results in fewer cars (not so ironically as parking supply goes down, parking conflicts go up). However, the infrastructure doesn’t yet exist to support car free living. Food stores are designed with car transport in mind. Furthermore, our food services industry in Canada is highly concentrated with few retailers operating larger surface stores in areas that typically require a car to access. Many of the social and community services people use (schools, healthcare, recreation) are also concentrated in nodal points that require car transport to access. There are a few hardy souls who walk, bike or car share to meet their household needs, but they remain in the minority of the able bodied. Most community residents have at least one car per household and, if several members work at a distance may have more than one vehicle.
The realities of living in a suburb on the edge of a major metropolitan area necessitates more cars on the ground than the planners accommodated for. This is the context within which UBC and MoTI have made the UNA responsible for managing parking. However, they only transferred management of parking to the UNA, not the regulatory authority to effectively control parking (one of the drawbacks of not being a municipality).
The current Hawthorn Place parking system allows permitted resident on-street parking between 8am and 9pm (annual fee), visitor parking passes (annual fee), construction/service vehicle (free), and a small set of time limited on street parking (free) around the Old Barn Community Centre. Some of the streets are under the UNA’s authority (Eagle’s Drive, Larkin Drive, Logan Lane, and Hawthorn lane). West Mall, Thunderbird, and East Mall are technically under UBC’s direct authority, but UNA permit rules apply.
Residents identify three persistent problems: lack of sufficient guest parking for episodic home events, a grey market reselling of visitor parking permits, and lack of time-limited parking places around the Old Barn Community Centre.
One Hawthorn Place resident shared the following:
“I think many residents know that the parking pass system isn’t working as intended. I have personally talked to several people who indicated that they purchased their parking pass from ‘someone’ in the neighbourhood. These people regularly drive into our neighbourhood in the morning, park their vehicle, and walk into work somewhere on the UBC campus. Whatever the fee owners are charging, it must be highly competitive with the parking fees charged by UBC Parking.”
“The main reason this bothers me is that I have not been able to park on the street in front of my home at times because of all these cars.”
“There seems to be no penalty for owners who do this. If there were consequences, it might deter some owners from this practice.”
Colleague and neighbour Dean Kussella shared this observation with me about our current parking system:
“The evolution of the neighborhood parking has been a disappointment. I see it as more of a cash-grab by the UNA to bandage over a problem of tenants selling/giving guest parking passes to non-resident people working or studying at UBC. We talk about importance of community, but it seems to only apply if you are a resident of the area with friends and family within walking distance. Having guests over that need to drive here for a BBQ or other social event now requires the resident to get an annual visitor pass to give to them or have them pay for parking.”
“Hawthorn Lane was completed in 2005. One parking stall was included for each unit and there is no guest parking for the condo complex.”
“A visitor pass was free (or nominal charge) at that time which helped offset the need for guest parking in the building. Also most of the area streets had free parking after ~6pm which was ok if a resident had a evening get together so visitors could park without penalty.”
“The visitor pass system was abused by some of the tenants I believe, which led to parking issues on some of the streets up until the early evening. To address the issue, street parking fees were gradually increased up to the current annual $140+tax for visitor pass and same price for the 1st resident permit. The UNA resident permit is more expensive than most of the City of Vancouver resident street parking passes, except for passes issued to recent residents of the busy West End area.”
“UNA does have a day pass system capped at 15 days, with special permission for any days over that. This requires planning in advance and the office was only open M-F during business hours. We were never organized enough to get these passes.”
“Free Hawthorn neighborhood street parking was restricted over the years so now only a few streets have free parking for a few hours, and some have free parking after 6-7pm. The all-day free hourly parking I believe was to give friends and family access to the neighborhood, and enable the community centre to have parking available for people taking their programs. These spots are almost always full during the day, at least on Eagles Drive, and seems to be used by many of the people going to the UBC Tennis Centre or other UBC program.”
“I did complain once in the past about a someone parking using a visitor pass daily, but they continued for a few more years, so I suppose no action was taken by UNA to address. It is pretty obvious over a few weeks of observing what cars are abusing the visitor passes, but it doesn’t seem action is taken by the UNA to address both the issue of the visitor using the pass and the resident giving or selling the pass to these visitors.”
The problems residents identify are persistent and difficult to solve. Every now and again a UNA Director or staff person comes up with a ‘plan’ to solve the situation. The solutions, however, are often as vexing as the problems they try to solve.
Vexing Solutions
Over the years there have been a number of proposals to resolve parking concerns. Few have actually made it into play. The current approach is a compromise approach that ‘sort of works,’ as one neighbour said to me. Some time around 2010 one UNA staff person came up with a multi-coloured parking map that proposed to restrict parking more closely to a resident’s actual address (as opposed to having a permit for Hawthorn Place in general). As previously noted, UBC Properties Trust tried to put parking meters into Hawthorn Place in the early 2000s. More prosaic policies have tried to price parking out of existence. One former elected UNA Director suggested a free-market auction style approach to parking.
Hawthorn resident may have noticed UNA staff walking (and in one instance scootering) around the neighbourhood writing down licence plates of cars with visitor permits and counting the number of cars with resident permits and noting their habitual locations. After seeing a handful of such folks go by my curiosity was piqued and I started to ask them about their survey.
From a number of such conversations it seems that the UNA staff are reviewing the current parking situation with an eye toward moving into a digital license plate reader for resident on-street parking and a web/app-based visitor parking system that would require logging each visitor’s licence plate (and I assume paying for short term parking) each time a person visits.
I was intrigued by these ideas and asked the UNA Chair, Richard Watson for some more formal details. Richard replied via email:
“UNA staff are considering a system that is similar to what UBC already is using called Automated Licence Plate Recognition (ALPR) + digital parking / ticketing management system. For now they are in the information gathering and evaluation stage. They are far from making recommendations or decisions.”
“Our CAO, Sundance Topham, has indicated that UNA staff will bring information to the Board if and when they plan to make a change like that. I’m not expecting this to happen this fiscal year.”
There are a lot of questions unanswered with this current solution to parking woes.
While this tech fix might end the grey market sale of visitor passes, it will likely increase visitor parking costs. These kinds of solutions often reduce the human labour costs while increasing the fixed capital costs. Any proposal would likely include a detailed cost comparison and one anticipates any additional costs will be reflected in further increases in parking permit fees.
Another potential implication is the end of the use of the visitor pass for regular caregivers (several of whom support families in our neighbourhood) and family members who visit on a habitual basis.
Irrespective of whatever the new solution ultimately is, I suspect parking will continue as an issue until we no longer have personal vehicles. While such a world is possible it will require a signifiant upgrade in public transit, access to groceries and services within walking distance to one’s residence, and ways of bringing work closer to home.