Sameer Sheth circled and circled the Crowfoot park-and-ride lot Monday morning, the first day of a return to free parking, and ultimately wedged his car between a giant snow bank and a few spare feet of payment.
“This was the only place I could find after going around for 15 minutes,” said Sheth, who wound up being late for work.
At the other end of the C-Train line, Bhasker Vyas parked his SUV against a mound of snow at the Somerset-Bridlewood lot.
And Shari Collins also played illegal park-in-a-snowbank-and-ride.
“I only hope a fire truck never had to try to get past my car,” Collins said.
The morning scramble resembled the free-for-all that existed before the $3 daily parking fee was imposed. It was removed by council under Mayor Naheed Nenshi.
But there’s a big difference: all three LRT lot users paid $70-a-month for reserved spots, but were frozen out by unwitting people who didn’t notice the tiny yellow “reserved” signs.
“They were way up high, like bus stop signs. Who drives around in rush hour looking up?” Collins said.
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“Either way I look at it, Calgary Transit screwed up. They ripped us off our ‘monthly’ fee by one day and put up ridiculously small signs so that nobody noticed them.”
Along with the end of the despised $3 daily park-andride fee, Monday heralded the start of reserved parking spots at the lots -about 700 of the more than 10,000 available stalls at LRT stations.
In response to complaints from those who paid for a reserved spot and were shut out, the city is promising larger signs today to highlight the reserved spots, along with Calgary Transit and Calgary Parking Authority officials to enforce the rules.
With so many reservation holders forced to park illegally and so many others illegally using reserved stalls, the parking agency didn’t enforce the rules on a chaotic Day 1.
The large signs were supposed to go up on the weekend, said transit planning manager Neil McKendrick. Then the snowstorm happened and not all the banners went up, he said.
“I guess we should have expected that if a disaster was going to strike this program, it would . . . and it did,” McKendrick said.
“There were a couple places like in Brentwood where the (reserved) signs were so small that even I had trouble finding them, and I knew what I was looking for,” McKendrick said.
The small yellow signs look identical to the ones warning would-be thieves of police bait car, said Lori Edey, frustrated that she had to travel to Brentwood station after finding the reserved Crowfoot spots taken.
Nenshi asked on Facebook and Twitter how the first day of free parking went.
The complaints were sprinkled among drivers and non-drivers alike who liked that the $3 fee is gone.
“I apologize that this has been very messy today,” Nenshi said. “Hopefully things go smoother tomorrow.”
Reserved parking isn’t a totally new concept to Calgary Transit.
Its lot at Fish Creek-Lacombe offered a popular $45 monthly reservation program during the original free parking days, and then bumped up the charge to $90 after council approved the daily charge for all LRT lots in 2009.
Mark Coady found a spot Monday by getting to Crowfoot lot at 6: 30 a.m., but wasn’t sure where the reserved stalls he was supposed to use were.
“Frankly, I’ve always thought it was a bad idea to go back to free parking and it seems that the experience of others (and I anticipate myself tomorrow) is proof of that. Bring back paid parking!” he wrote in an e-mail.
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