Parking In Guelph

Currently the City of Guelph has a population of 100,000 and is one of the fastest growing economic regions in Canada. A large majority of this population comes from one of the countrys top research and comprehensive Universities that educates approximately 16,000 students, with an additional 1,100 in 2003 due to the double cohort. In previous years the city has implemented certain fines and by-laws to help off-set costs for providing parking in the downtown core, with hopes of increasing its business. The City Council has proposed several ideas for introducing new parking structures and repairing current structures. However, there have been no proposals to accommodate the parking throughout the rest of the city. The City of Guelph is now abusing the parking by-laws and trying to capitalize on them, making up for other areas in the parking budget that are not meeting their proposed numbers. The city has not taken into account that a number of students in the city drive. With a good portion of the student housing around the city housing an average of 4 people per house, with only 2 parking spaces available. When approached with this subject, a parking official for the city responded with you should not have bought the house, is this the message the city is trying to convey to its citizens? Dont move into our city because we dont have enough parking, which is a completely opposite statement than what is revealed in the cities mission statement. The parking enforcement officers also focus on the areas of the city that are heavily concentrated with students. They understand that the extra surge of vehicles in these areas will create extra capital but they do not take into consideration the limited capital in which these students hold. Sign this petition to change the parking by-laws and stop the parking abuse in the City of Guelph.fc