Spending more time parking than the destination
The city of Brantford has a plan. Over the next ten years there will be construction around the downtown area. The city has deemed construction necessary to uphold underground infrastructure according to the city of Brantford website.
The Business Improvement Area (BIA) is a local board that is present in Downtown Brantford to help those with businesses in the downtown area to have a voice when events like the revamping of downtown are happening.
“We have infrastructure underground that’s over 100 years old. Yeah. There are wooden sewers down there…the outlook that we have to have, [is] that, yes, bad things are going to happen, and we’ll lose business, but it has to be done. We can’t keep going on with over 100-year-old infrastructure, it’s just not working,” Annette Wawzonek, executive director of the Downtown Brantford BIA, said.
A large problem that businesses in the downtown area are having is the lack of foot traffic. This is a result of all the road construction leaving even less parking than there was previously.
There are many people who use street parking: customers, students and business owners. However, sometimes people will park their vehicles for longer than the designated time or the snow will take up two spots. While there are some aspects of this that only nature can control, there are things that can be done to help.
Some solutions that have been brought up are from Annette Wawzonek of the BIA, “The BIA’s also advocated in the past for pay and display parking.” In Annette’s opinion, “I know that there’s business owners that don’t agree, but it would solve 99% of the problems.”
Lizanna Koster of Old World Marketplace’s idea involved a token system at the parking lot on Icomm Drive. Park at the parkade and then you can go run errands and claim a token from whichever business you enter to use as payment for your parking. “They used to do that at Scotiabank. They used to give out tokens …Before the automatic system.”
Just as well, the City could discount or make parking free in the parkade during disruptive construction times. It is free for Bulldog games for the whole day. In the last year there was a post made informing everyone that on the day of the Bulldog games the parkade is free.
Koster commented, “Come early, and you can go shopping, go out for dinner, lunch, and then go to the game. The very next day, the city said, Parking from 5:00 p.m. to 11:00pm [on game days] …Why would they do that? Wouldn’t have hurt them? Wouldn’t that have been nice to help downtown?” Koster said.
Downtown Brantford is a community that needs to work together to help the businesses locals love to go to. As many people drive instead of walking there needs to be places to park.
“No parking, no people. No people, no store,” Koster said.
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