Parking in Waterloo Region

[MidTowner]

Oh, right, I was forgetting that the people making use of this land and infrastructure want someone else to pay for it for them. Sorry about that.

If we’re talking about free parking, well, you’re getting great value no matter how long it takes you to find a spot or what a headache it is getting in and out of it.

I actually do dispute that parking counting is expensive even as a proportion of the cost of a simple paved surface lot. In the case of the various surface lots, you need a simple counter at the entrance to each to count the instances of a car entering the lot or leaving the lot. It’s not necessary to have a sensor in each space. The system itself might be expensive, but I bet the hardware to feed into it from the garage and a few of the surface lots would be cheap. I've been at pretty rinky-dink surface lots where the bar won't lift because the counter has detected too many entries and is waiting to detect a car leaving.

And the system probably could not be considered expensive if it avoids the cost of a new $10 million parking garage…