In the world of tomorrow, we will all be using flying cars to get to work and go about our daily business. Or perhaps you prefer to imagine Star Trek style teleportation from place to place?
Until fantasy becomes reality, we’re going to have to deal with traffic and parking. Probably for a very long time.
But vast expanses of asphalt are as ugly as they are inefficient and wasteful. If we’re talking about the South Okanagan Events Centre, the subject of a City of Penticton parking study, it’s made worse by being relatively empty most weekdays.
Of course, the reverse is true on the weekends or event nights, when it’s packed and drivers end up filling all the residential parking for blocks around.
The city is trying to come up with solutions to reduce parking pressure during those peak times, and has even purchased several pieces of land around the SOEC campus; some are already being used for overflow parking.
But whether they are paved in gravel or asphalt, more parking lots is neither a long-term or sustainable solution. Communities are moving toward more sustainable modes of transportation, and in coming decades parking lots will be as archaic as hitching posts.
Though the mayor has spoken against it, a parkade for the SOEC makes more sense as an investment than continuing to spread parking farther out.
But the long-term goal should be to reduce the need for parking spots.
Eventually, we will have better ways of getting around, whether that is fleets of automated vehicles giving us door-to-door or just vastly improved transit.
That’s something the city should be considering the next time they want to spend a couple of million on another piece of land. How much would the same cash buy in improvements to transit, getting people to and from the SOEC?