After Global News talked to a Saint John teenager pushing for an expansion of the two-hour free parking window in Saint John’s uptown, the CEO of the city’s chamber of commerce is saying the best move for the city would be to scrap free parking altogether.
In Saint John’s south and central peninsula, free parking is available for two hours between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays. After 5 p.m. and on weekends there’s no time limit and it remains free.
Erin Cusack, 18, says the two-hour limit isn’t fair to students who attend Saint John High School and St. Malachy’s Memorial High School.
“It doesn’t make sense for students to have to worry about leaving class to go move their car,” Cusack told Global News last week.
She’s proposed a few solutions that would assist students parking in the uptown core.
But David Duplisea, the CEO of the city’s chamber of commerce, is saying that’s a bad idea.
“There are options for students rather than encouraging them all to bring their cars into the uptown core,” he says.
“We already subsidize school buses and things like that through our taxes and we also subsidize city transit.”
Duplisea lives and works uptown.
He says every day he sees people manipulating the two-hour system; moving their car from one spot to another, moving their co-workers’ cars for them, even erasing the chalk mark the parking authority uses to track parking.
“We don’t have a parking problem in Saint John, we have a problem with people who want to pay for parking in Saint John.”
According to the city’s website, there are 5,000 on-street parking spaces in uptown.
Those spaces need to accommodate residents as well as people commuting in for school, work or errands throughout the day.
“There is a way to have residential, business as well as students all coincide within one existing area,” Duplisea says.
“One of the challenges is that there is free parking in certain areas of the uptown core and people find a loophole to be able to come and take those spaces.”
That very loophole is what previously took Cusack and her classmates out of class – to shuffle their cars into new spaces for their next two free hours.
Duplisea says the best thing for the city would be to ditch that free parking altogether.
“There’s low-hanging fruit there for the city at a time when we need the revenue,” he says.
“At a time when we’re looking for climate change policies as well, we should be kind of discouraging people coming in with their car into the core.
“Instead, we’re making it easy through our loopholes for people just to come in and park anywhere.”
Cusack’s proposed leniency in parking guidelines has yet to be discussed by the city’s parking commission.