Quote:
Originally Posted by hoser111
That lot is notorious for it's booting. I know a few people who've gotten stung there, within minutes. I've not heard of anywhere else in town that boots vehicles. Not to say there isn't.
That's the Twisted Sisters/Skye site so i wonder if United Gulf is paying it's legal bills for The Waterton, et al, $115 at a time!
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I've seen other lots with NOGO NOTOW signage, but only a few. What astounded me is how fast they boot (as little as two minutes) - much faster than an airport,
even faster than an airport that's at HIGH/ORANGE terror threat level!
I would understand this during regular business hours, but during low-demand times late at night or on the weekend? Are there that many offices that have random, erratic hours across every hour of the day? I know there's an accountants office on the corner of Oxford and Young that has no defined business hours, meaning that workers there can show up at any time and therefore their parking has no "after hours" parking.
I have to say that Halifax has sure changed in the last decade, where it's gradually turning into a city that "never sleeps" in spite of only being around 400,000 people within the county lines. It's already like that with parking enforcement on many private lease lots and public/private pay-and-display lots on the Peninsula. We may as well say that the notion of "normal weekday hours" in Halifax is already going out the window.
I really question the economics of having 24-hour enforcement on many lots in this city during times that enforcement costs would very likely exceed any potential revenue from either parking fees or parking fines (even on the scale of the fine that I just got whacked with) during the dead of night or on the weekend.
I've heard many parking horror stories from cities Vancouver and Calgary, but what happened to me today would totally kill most horror stories from those cities! (Those cities still have a some parking horror stories that would even scare people the world over.)
Canada is becoming a very unforgiving country for parking, where for instance, downtown Calgary is second only to Lower Manhatten in New York City (NYC) in terms of off-street parking fees, even though Calgary has a whole only has a population base of 1 million compared to a population base of 18 million for NYC, further reinforcing the need for stronger urban transit systems across all of Canada.
I thought I would have to go to New York City to see parking enforcement of the extreme that I got hit with today when it turns out that "my own backyard" is actually worse! I have to say, "WTF is going on with Canada?"
Overnight Drunk Parking Demand on Weekends
I do wonder how much of the weekend downtown street parking congestion in Halifax is due to people leaving their cars overnight and into the next day after a night of hard drinking (to avoid drunk driving or expensive taxi rides). Better overnight transit across the "urban core" of Halifax Metro and key suburban arterial-class roads may help reduce this parking demand, if it is in fact causing a good chunk of the weekend parking congestion in downtown Halifax.
The reason I'm bringing up the potential issue of inflated parking demand due to "overnight drunk parking", is that the on-street parking congestion on downtown Halifax's streets is now almost as bad during weekend daytime hours as it is during normal weekday working hours.
As odd as this sounds, I've usually had easier times finding weekend on-street or off-street parking (that's not in a low-clearance parking garage) in other, bigger Canadian cities' downtown cores than in Halifax's core. Could the overnight drunk parking, small street block size, very tight driveway spacing on some of these street blocks compared to other cities be contributing factors to on-street parking issue too, aside from the over-regulation/over-pricing on many off-street lots that causes them to often be under-utilized, let alone the future real estate development plans dissuading people from relying on some of the existing off-street lots on a sustained basis?
Regards,
Richard Kannegiesser