Boulevard Parking (Kitchener)

[danbrotherston]

I find it funny this is seriously an issue with people.  Aesthetics seems like a poor reason to not allow it - at least in the winter months.  Enforcement of parking over sidewalks needs to be improved anyway and should be enforced here as well.  It seems like a funny thing to require a fee for when its an area that the homeowner is required to maintain anyway - but if there are costs here that I don't see (like enforcement of bylaws) then by all means it seems worth charging for.

These are the types of issues that I feel like people just object to because on principle they don't like cars.  The legitimate problems (which seem minor) can be dealt with effectively.  And this isn't a rant about "anti-car people", the same things happens in reverse all the time.  Improvements for bikes or pedestrians get objected to for really dumb reasons.

I don't know about others here, but I kind of care about the place I live not looking like shit.

This is both untrue, and unrelated, I never cleared my boulevard, which isn't a problem because I never had a car, but plenty of my neighbours also didn't clear their boulevards and just drove over the snow.  But like I said, still unrelated, homeowners are required to clear the sidewalk, but still need special permission to store a car on it (i.e., a construction permit), maintaining something does not grant you exclusive rights to it (no matter what people wrongly think about parking spaces in other cities).

As for the problems being minor, that could be true (although I'll point out, this neighbourhood in California was MISERABLE--hardly minor, but not something that would happen tomorrow in our city, but it could trend there eventually, and it's incredibly hard to reverse).

On the flip side, the advantages are similarly minor, and of questionable value. We're allowing some people (because not everyone has a boulevard, and mostly wealthier homeowners) to have free access to public property for more parking.  What is the advantage?...they can store more cars. Why don't we fight as hard to give me free access to public property to store other things?

I think is equally indicative of a society obsessed with and addicted to cars to a level that we don't even realize what we're doing.