More pay parking at Metro Vancouver parks angers hikers, day-trippers

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Does it pay to visit the park when you have to pay to park?

Absolutely not, said east Vancouver’s Khalid Yahya.

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“That’s why we’re leaving,” he said this week as he and his wife climbed back into their car after seeing they now have to pay to visit Whytecliff Park in West Vancouver.

No way, said Cheri Spagnol of New Westminster at the same park.

“Why on earth should I pay for parking on public land in Canada?” the road-flagging worker said as her colleague from Maple Ridge nodded in hearty agreement.

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West Van city council rolled out pay parking at three of the district’s parks on Feb. 12 after mulling over the option since 1997. It now costs $5.23 an hour, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, to leave your vehicle in the lots at the three parks.

Impark will patrol the lots and a fine is $98. West Van residents can get a $20 annual pass.

The district didn’t respond to a request for information, but council minutes indicate paid parking was introduced for the same stated reasons other municipalities have implemented it or are considering doing so: Traffic management and revenue.

West Van council has heard an earful since the fees went into effect.

Letters to council from residents of the North Shore and Vancouver, with the names redacted, cite not just the cost, but the need to have a cellphone (with a data plan); that the nearest bus stop is two kilometres away; that the walk from transit is dangerous along narrow Marine Drive, which lacks a sidewalk most of the way and has limited shoulders; that people with disabilities, the elderly and teens shouldn’t have to pay to enjoy nature; and that the district is putting up roadblocks to those with mental-health issues.

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“My wife and I are retired seniors living on a reduced budget, and will have to look elsewhere to enjoy our North Shore. Where? Who knows?” wrote one man from North Vancouver who said it would now cost the couple more than $100 a week were they to continue to visit West Van parks as regularly as they had until now.

A quick poll of a handful of small-business owners in the district found pay parking at parks is unpopular with them too.

“It’s hard enough to get people out here, let alone make them pay for parking,” said Thomas Eleizegui, general manager and partner at Isetta Cafe Bistro in West Van, not far from Whytecliff.

Growing trend

The West Van parks join others in Metro Vancouver that charge for parking, including Lynn Headwaters, təmtəmíxʷtən/Belcarra, Grouse (administered by the resort) and one parking lot at Pacific Spirit.

The parking area for the Nelson Canyon/Whyte Lake trailhead in West Van isn’t even a real parking lot, West Vancouverite Charlotte Henriksson pointed out. Worse, the parking lot is an access to a provincial park (Cypress) and the Baden Powell Trail.

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Henriksson lives in West Van and uses its parks four or five times a week, so paid for an annual parking pass, but is passionate about parks being equally available to all.

“Access to these parks does not favour you unless you have a car; you need a car to get there,” she said. “At Whyte Lake you could possibly park (at a strip mall) in Caufield, but it’s a very dangerous walk along the side of the road.”

Every single person she has met on the Whyte Lake trails is against the parking fees, she said, whether they’re from West Van, elsewhere in Metro or out-of-province.

“It prevents people’s access to nature — West Vancouver is not promoting physical health, fitness or mental health by restricting access to nature. All Canadians should have the right to have access to nature.”

Stewardship

Henriksson wasn’t alone among those canvassed who wondered: Who ‘owns’ nature?

In a narrow legal sense, governments do, but it’s more than just a philosophical question, one University of B.C. expert said.

After all, decisions made by governments influence the lives of residents every day, said Lorien Nesbitt, an assistant professor of urban forestry and environmental justice who once worked as a community-based environmental planner.

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“Who owns parks is not an airy-fairy thing, it’s a really practical thing,” she said. “It goes to reconciliation in our region, it goes to whether people are able to contribute to their health by getting access to green space.

“Most philosophical things are practical because they’re about how we live our lives and how we experience the world.”

There are a few ways to understand environmental justice within the Metro region, she said.

“One is that the parks and green spaces are on unceded Indigenous territory, that’s an environmental injustice when (the area’s First Nations) aren’t involved in stewarding those lands.”

Other environmental justice considerations focus on access, she said.

“Whether people of all ages and stages and incomes and identities can make it to those parks and enjoy them and feel welcome.”

One of her students is studying the relationship between green spaces and mental health, and there is lots of evidence that being around nature, especially for urbanites, is important for mental health.

“There are a lot of different theories about why this is, but we tend to find when people spend more time in and with nature they are calmer, they have lower stress, they feel better about their life and about themselves,” Nesbitt said. “It gives people a chance to recover from being in urban environments that can otherwise be tough for humans.

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“If (paying for parking) is a matter of underfunding, we need to think about our priorities — why we’re not funding access to nature. Parks are something people in our cities want and need.”

TransLink, while not having a specific bus-to-parks’ program, does increase bus service to several parks during peak times, a spokesman said, including Stanley Park, English Bay, Spanish Banks, Grouse Mountain, Mount Seymour, Belcarra, White Pine Beach and Buntzen Lake.

These transit service changes occur four times a year and are based on seasonal patterns and customer demand, he said.

Short end of stick

Raising revenue and managing congested parking areas are important, but there are approaches that don’t throw up obstacles to access, a colleague of Nesbitt’s in UBC’s faculty of forestry said.

“Most popular parks in Metro Vancouver have traffic congestion and parking issues,” Keunhyun Park, who teaches urban forestry at UBC, said. “They’re gorgeous destinations and people want to visit them, but visitors have an over-reliance on private vehicles.

“The problems of our high reliance on automobiles are multi-faceted.”

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Environmental degradation, for one. Equity of access, for another.

“We cannot solve the problems with sticks only,” Park said. “We’re looking at long-term behavioural changes and my perspective is we need both carrots and sticks, and a parking fee is effectively a stick to reduce the overall number of cars or reduce the duration of the stay.”

Carrots would include transit that is convenient, reliable, frequent and of high quality.

“Those should go simultaneously with the sticks,” Park said. “Reducing the number of cars visiting our parks is a necessary precondition to make room for better access (by public transit).

“They should go together.”

It’s a dance, balancing our needs with nature’s, or as Park’s colleague Nesbitt put it: “Our cities are places where people have their social needs and they exist with nature, which has its needs, and we sort of work together to create urban spaces.”

Metro, outside of lawns and boulevards during water-ban droughts, is evergreen and some might argue all of the Lower Mainland is parklike in a way, so why worry about paid parking issues in out-of-the-way parks?

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But despite its 366-day (in leap years) frondescence, Vancouver, for example, has a lot less leafiness than other major Canadian cities. Vancouver’s canopy coverage is about 20 per cent; most cities have a target of 30 per cent and, with mitigating extreme weather events in mind, researchers suggest that number should be closer to 40 per cent, Nesbitt said.

“We have a lot more evergreen trees that look a lot greener and more colourful year-round,” she said. “And we can see the mountains from most places in the city and that gives us a feeling of greenness.

“That’s a good thing.

“But our canopy cover in the city of Vancouver is certainly not very impressive compared to many other jurisdictions.”

Pay or go?

Sky Corbett and Mary Freeman were staring at the pay-parking sign at Whytecliff, pondering the question: Should they pay or should they go?

They had driven in from Langley and Pitt Meadows so that Freeman, a photographer, could capture some shots in the sharp light of a recent below-zero morning.

“At first I thought, ‘Oh shoot, I don’t have this parking app,’ ” Corbett said.

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“We were unaware of this,” added Freeman. “I don’t think I’d come back, this would definitely be a factor in that decision.”

“I’d go to Lighthouse Park instead next time,” Corbett said.

Informed Lighthouse Park also now has paid parking, the two, almost in unison, said, “Boycott!”

“Then it’s Golden Ears from now on,” Freeman said.

gordmcintyre@postmedia.com

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