Parking in Waterloo Region

[ookpik]

I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to figure out who was parking downtown every day and start issuing those people tickets rather just the occasional visitor that happens to park all over downtown visiting a bunch of different businesses. License-plate reading technology is scary-good these days and could conceivably be deployed to capture all this revenue from the worst offenders that are habitually parking for free instead of paying to store their.

Coke6pk mentioned above that licence plate data is only stored for one day due to privacy concerns. I don't see any issue with retaining it for up to 30 days for the purpose you suggest. That would catch the "frequent flyers, er parkers."

Also what kind of boss lets their employees waste time every day going to move a car?

I was wondering that as well. Also what employee can't afford to pay for a dedicated parking spot so much that they'd rather go out every couple of hours, in all weather conditions, to play musical parking spots with their car. If this is a real issue rather than an imagined one then we have a serious management problem among employers in the downtown core.

The Region purchased parking passes in the Parkade for their staff (and in fact, it would not surprise me if the Parkade was built partly to service the parking needs for Regional staff).  However, several years ago, the Waterloo Town Square lots were full while the Parkade was empty during daytime hours.  It was discovered that part of the problem was the Regional staff disliked parking in the Parkade and preferred to park in the surface lots instead.  Adding the 2-hour limit encouraged the Regional staff to park in the Parkade.

This would be easy to address by keeping licence plate data for at least a few days in order to identify "regulars." That would also catch others who are abusing the free parking in Uptown.