1. Your own garage/street
2. A bike rack
3. Assiniboine Park

The Uniter is a downtown street weekly, but it’s also the official newspaper of the University of Winnipeg. As a graduate and employee of the UW, I’ve had to get downtown and stay there for up to 12 hours at a time, on and off since 2001. I own a car, but I have also walked (when I lived in Osborne Village), used my bike and taken the bus. Parking is crucial though, and darn near impossible. If you hit up the one or two hour parking on Spence or Young, you’ll be back and forth all day moving it. No, we don’t have a massive parking lot with parkades like the University of Manitoba (which costs an arm and a leg) but there are a few small lots. It’s a disaster trying to park downtown, as anyone knows, but especially hard when you’re a student on a budget (or a magazine editor on a budget). That, and nearly every single car I’ve owned has been broken into while parked on Spence (then again, my car was stolen from the St. Vital mall parking lot in broad daylight, so no space is really safe).

So what’s the solution? There used to be a strip of Young Street that had free parking (which is now two hour) and with much of downtown parking now up to $2/hour it’s not easy to park comfortably and live your life. Yes, you can take your bike everywhere, but with bike theft at an absurd number (3,000 stolen annually in Winnipeg with a recovery rate of half) and winter existing for half of the year, is it practical? For many, yes. For those who want to avoid showing up at work a sweaty, disgusting mess, no.

The only solution? Free monitored parking for cars and bikes throughout the downtown area. Someone get on that.

Part of the series: The Uniter 30

Published in Volume 68, Number 14 of The Uniter (December 4, 2013)