According to the Winnipeg Parking Authority, there are more than 30,000 parking spots in the downtown, including 2,500 parking meters and 17,000 off-street parking stalls. Winnipeg lots are also very safe. Most are very open and well lit. Most have attendants, or Automotive Real Estate Supervisors as they like to be called these days, and are easy to find.

Winnipeg is also a bargain. In New York or London, if you could find a spot, you would waste most of your day trying to pull together the financing to pay for it. Parking lots in Toronto will charge up to $25 a day during weekdays, Calgary is in the $12 to $15 per-day range. In Winnipeg, you can find a lot for as low as $8 a day, which appears to be about $8 a day more than most Winnipeggers want to pay.

Yet, Winnipeggers still complain that there is no parking downtown and use it as an excuse to avoid the core. Better to park 400 metres away from the doors at Polo Park than walk a block downtown apparently.

A recent study in the U.S. looked at parking in Lafayette, Indiana. They counted the number of parking spots across the entire city of 155,000 people and discovered there were 250,000 more parking spaces than registered vehicles. And that didn’t count driveways. If everyone left home in Lafayette and went shopping at the same time there would still be a quarter of a million empty spots around the city. And I am willing to bet some people still wouldn’t be able to find a free spot anywhere.

I imagine the same numbers are true for Winnipeg. Add up all the Home Depot, Tims, 7-11 and strip mall spots and all five parking stalls outside of Starbucks and the numbers would be staggering.

The opening of the MTS Centre, CanWest Global Park and the Red River College campus in the Exchange over the last couple of years didn’t provoke a capacity crisis so maybe there were enough spots after all.  

The new Manitoba Hydro tower on Portage, however, may finally push the downtown parking to capacity. The new building will bring some 2,000 new workers downtown although provide just 150 parking spots. Add in the new condo and apartment projects planned for the downtown, Village and Exchange and we may start running into some serious parking issues. Unless we can convince everyone at Hydro to work the night shift.

Winnipeg is a city built for the car, and public transit is a mess, so we are stuck dealing with parking issues for some time. The Parking Authority has gone some way to identifying new parking spots, such as getting rid of loading zones in front of buildings that haven’t been occupied since the Vimy Ridge offensive. They have also created more spots by introducing swanky new high tech parking pay stations that are replacing the old meters and pulling Winnipeg into the 21st century. There are two drawbacks to the new stations however—you now have to walk a block in order to pay and you are also denied the perverse pleasure of running back to your car and its expired meter and punching the air in joy at finding no ticket and then seeing the face of the onrushing commissionaire go from expectant glee to crestfallen disappointment.

For a city built around the car, Winnipeg has such animus toward parkers. While the Downtown and Exchange BIZ groups have lobbied hard to get parking enforcement officers to be more consumer-friendly, the perception remains of legions of grumpy commissionaires scouring the streets looking for parking scofflaws in order to ticket and tow—creating its own unique urban anxiety. It fuels the notion that downtown is a hostile parking environment and liable to cost you more than a few loonies in a meter. Few things raise people’s ire as much as a parking ticket. Normally law abiding citizens will attempt any ruse to avoid paying them, so much so that the city now has its commissionaires take photographs of the car with the ticket in order to cut down on parking disputes. According to the City, there were 117,000 tickets issued in 2005, a sizeable proportion of which were disputed. The photos apparently have cut down the number of disputes by 75 per cent.

So are we really just whiney and lazy? Are there really no parking spots downtown, or are there just no spots next to the building we want to go to? The frustration of having to walk 50 metres to a store is almost too much for some of us to bear.

So, I keep a handful of toonies in my car and force myself to pull into a pay lot when I am downtown. I’d rather pay up then burn up more of the world’s gas circling looking for that perfect meter. I will then sit and enjoy my beer and wait 15 minutes for my friend to find his free spot and then make him pay for my beer as an apology for making me wait.