Parking in Waterloo Region

[plam]

Maybe enforcement in K-W is different.

Enforcement of the overnight parking ban, as reported here in the past, is largely on a complaint basis. This is wrong since the ban only exists for some people (people whose neighbours don't have the inclination to call in complaints). But the ban itself should not be in place, nor should the three-hour limit.

There is no disadvantage to visitor or casual parking on city streets overnight. Nor is there any disadvantage to resident parking on city streets overnight, or at any other time. If the parking supply is limited, charges can be introduced until demand falls to meet supply. Simple.

In many older areas of the Region, driveways are single-width and garages may or may not exist. For families with two cars, there is a lot of incentivize to widen driveways, eliminating landscaped area along with on-street parking. It's senseless: because there are four hours of the day when the City of Kitchener (for instance) does not allow me to park my car in front of my house on the street, I might opt to widen by driveway so that parking spot in front of my house (and the grass or garden I may tear up, or even the street tree I might cut down) is now unavailable 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Agreed. It always seemed to me like it was NIMBYish to not let people park cars on the street overnight. It's not like the space isn't already reserved for parking. If you really want to make it difficult for people, you can have street cleaning parking rules (must move car twice a week) like Montreal. The overall overnight parking ban just has the noxious effects that you mention. Shoup also points out that driveways just replace storage on street with storage on property without increasing the amount of storage (because you can't park in front of the driveway anyway).

I only think you need resident parking when there's a demonstrated lack of space for cars, which is not going to be the problem in most places around here.