Is North Park Village About to Lose its Sidewalks?
Okay obviously not all of them… If you have walked through North Park Village in the last year, you would have noticed the former parking spaces that had been outlined in cones creating a wider pedestrian space. But maybe not for too much longer…
For whatever reason, North Park Village ended up with what must be the narrowest sidewalks through its commercial centre, James Bay Village is likely a close second. Along the eastern side of the of the village the sidewalk is just the regular 1.5 metre sidewalk that you might find in a residential area on the surrounding streets. Compared to many of the other urban centres, this limited pedestrian space has likely limited the ability of North Park to be as successful commercially than some of the others in the city, as the sense is that this is a car space, not people space. The village has done what it could despite this limitation, until the beginning of the pandemic.
At the beginning of the pandemic the issues with the narrow sidewalk were highlighted due to the lineups of people outside of businesses that wanted to limit the number of customers inside. The sidewalks in North Park Village especially outside the bakery and the liquor store were almost impassable while keeping a safe distance from people. At the time I argued that space needed to be created for the pedestrians and the City eventually got on board creating additional pedestrian space by removing parking space here and in other urban centres in Victoria. While there was some concern about the loss of parking at the time, this was easily countered in the name of safety. But here we are, 18 months into the pandemic and there is a push to get this parking space back for people to use while shopping. In total maybe 15 parking spots were lost, but in return there is an extremely large pedestrian space, granted not the most beautiful of them.
I fully understand the needs of the local businesses. While waiting to get into Patisserie Daniel a couple of months ago, I watched as the staff created a fire brigade line to get a huge order out to a truck that had to be parked around the corner. Of course on the flipside the additional space was making it so I could easily wait in line to buy things there as well. There is also a general thought that the parking spots in front of a business are going to provide easy spaces for those that want to come from further away to visit the store. This is not entirely wrong and on this point North Park Village is at a severe disadvantage as there is not a lot of currently open parking spots for those that don’t live nearby. That is not because there aren’t a lot of parking spots, there are. Those spots though are reserved as residential parking only though. If you have read the blog for a while, you would know my thoughts on those.
Over the last couple of weeks I have walked along the four blocks to the east of North Park Village in the 1100 Block: Balmoral, Grant, North Park and Caledonia. I walked each one at least twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon during weekdays and each block had multiple available spots. Caledonia had the least with just 7 or 8 and Balmoral had the most with 20 spots one day and 16 another. This is a huge amount of parking that could be used to support local businesses that is being kept from them. I recognise that some of these houses don’t have driveways and thus need to park a car on the street, but if there is that much surplus, surely a new more equitable solution could be arrived at. The easiest being to make the the streets 2 hour parking during business hours, say 8am to 6pm or by permit. So those residents along the street simply have to get a permit from the city and they can continue parking there, but the surplus spots could be used by customers. It would have no impact on anything except to create an opportunity with currently unused parking spots. I would prefer a paid permit system but that would need to be a citywide initiative and so for now it should simply be free to residents. Still it would open up at least 30 spots near the village, far more than would be gained by removing the new pedestrian space.
The City is currently conducting a review of all of the pandemic pedestrian spaces and I think that the North Park Village ones are at significant risk due to the amount of concern that has been raised by the local businesses but losing this space comes with the cost of losing so much opportunity.
That opportunity is the potential that this pedestrian space has if it was built into a proper sidewalk is immense. There would be room for the occasional bench, street tree or even a little patch of grass. It would make North Park Village a little friendlier while keeping its pedestrian improvements of the last few years moving in the right direction. If you love the pedestrian space in North Park Village please make sure to let City Council know.