Portage Place strip is the one to watch

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/07/2009 (6236 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Next time you nip into Staples in Portage Place for a new printer cartridge, be sure to feed the meter.

Downtown’s most parking-ticket prone stretch is right outside the office supply store in Portage Place, between Kennedy and Vaughan streets.

Meter 3201 serves at least seven sweet parking spots right outside the mall. Since Jan. 2007, motorists there have received 540 tickets.

Funny thing is, that’s not very many — only one ticket every two days.

According to the parking ticket database, downtown is not a particularly ticket-prone area.

Among the 25 most-ticketed spots in the city, only six are downtown and almost all of those are on Portage Avenue.

Another six are in the Exchange District and the rest are mostly around Health Sciences Centre or St. Boniface Hospital.

Though Winnipeggers love to moan about downtown parking, Downtown BIZ executive director Stefano Grande said he wasn’t surprised to hear that busy downtown streets such as Broadway, Carleton and Kennedy don’t even crack the top 25.

"The Winnipeg Parking Authority and the BIZ too, have been working hard to educate and make it easier for people to park downtown," Grande said.

Linda Wong, who was nipping into Portage Place Friday afternoon, said she often finds a spot along Portage Avenue and has never had a ticket.

She was surprised to hear she was plugging quarters into the meter motorists should most fear.

"Maybe people think they’re only going to be five minutes and they don’t feed the meter enough," said Wong, who works at Portage Place part time.

Earlier this month, the debate about downtown parking began anew when Colliers International reported that Winnipeg saw the highest spike in downtown parking rates of any city in Canada.

The report said it costs 72 per cent more — a daily median rate of $18 — to park downtown, although Impark, which owns many of Winnipeg’s parkades and lots, strongly disputed the figures.

Manitoba Hydro came under fire for moving hundreds of workers downtown and sucking up limited parking spots.

But staff at the Winnipeg Parking Authority say there are 35,000 spots downtown — plenty to meet the need.

"When Winnipeggers complain about the lack of parking, what they’re really complaining about is the lack of free parking" said Colin Stewart, the authority’s special projects manager.

Winnipeg’s civic parking meters charge $1 an hour downtown, one of the lowest rates in the country. That hasn’t budged for at least 15 years.

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca

Richest meter in Winnipeg

NUMBER 3444 on the south side of Assiniboine Avenue just west of Main Street rakes in the most dough because it’s used constantly by people zipping into the City of Winnipeg’s property and development office in Fort Garry Place for permits, zoning documents and the like.

Fearing a heist, the city won’t say exactly how many loonies it takes in over the course of a year. It’s "significantly more" than the next most lucrative meter, said Colin Stewart, the Winnipeg Parking Authority’s manager of special projects.

But don’t bother trying to steal the pay station. They’re titanium-armoured, bolted to the ground and each has an internal global-positioning-system tracer, so the WPA knows when they’ve been tampered with or tossed in the back of someone’s truck.