Parking in downtown Prince George will look drastically different come this fall.
On Monday night councillors voted amend a number of bylaws which pave the way for the rollout of licence plate recognition software.
The system will be active out mid October – plugging a loophole that allowed downtown workers to move their car every two hours to avoid a ticket. That time limit has increased to 3 hours, but City staff is banking on increased enforcement to get daily commuters into monthly lots.
The new system will be able to scan 5,000 license plates an hour and check the entire downtown parking area in 60-90 minutes. An identical system recently rolled out in New Westminster resulted in a 75% increase in tickets.
While the changes double the fines for first offenders to $50, Mayor Lyn Hall stresses that it’s not about the money.
“It’s not a cash grab, that was made fairly clear tonight, we are not in that business… what we are trying to do is trying to get those long term parkers that are on streets into the parkades.”
City Bylaw Manager Fred Crittenden noted that the increase brings the fines more in line with other similar offences.
Councillor Jillian Merrick was the lone councillor that disagreed and attempted to keep the fine at $25; “My worry is that a $50 first offence will be a big financial burden to some people.”
Also included in the changes, three hour parking will be implemented at the Civic Centre, Library and 4 Seasons Pool. City staff say the current free lots have “been abused” by employees of other businesses in the area.
Crittenden says there are 1,400 off street parking stalls downtown – but only 70% are occupied. The hourly rate for City owned lots will be 75 cents an hour or $4 a day.
As a part of the system roll out, a new online permitting portal will be launched and state of the art daily parking payment terminals will be installed. The whole thing is costing the City $172,500.
The parking bylaws will be enforced 7am-5pm Monday to Friday, with unlimited parking offered at all other times.
License plate recognition systems can give some privacy advocates the heebie jeebies, but Crittenden says images of non offending vehicles will be dumped at the end of each day. Images of offending plates will be stored for two years for court purposes.
He assures that the system will only ever be used for one thing; “parking only, so we are not going to be using it to say; for police looking for people who have warrants for their arrest because that’s something that we don’t have the enforcement ability to do.”
Rates for City owned off street lots can be found below
