Downtown Sault Ste. Marie has more than enough public parking to meet demand, a southern Ontario consultant told city council tonight.
In fact, our downtown has 800 parking spaces more than it needs, according to Ronauq Sabharwal, a transportation engineer from the Burlington office of CIMA+.
"There is an opportunity to reduce the amount of parking spaces servicing the study area without having a significant impact on the availability of parking," Sabharwal said as he presented findings from a study of the downtown parking situation.
A primary candidate for this potential re-utilization of a parking lot would be in the block framed by Queen Street and Albert, between Bruce and Elgin, he told councillors.
"The average parking occupancy there was 16 per cent, which is four times less than the occupancy of the nearest parking lot.
"So it may be a good candidate site for revised reutilization of that area as something other than parking," Sabharwal said.
"The main objective of this study was to review the current parking supply, demand and policy, and identify the strategies to support a more vibrant and accessible downtown area.
Downtown Sault Ste. Marie has about 1,200 parking spaces across 14 lots (not including the Bondar Pavilion lot, which was closed in the winter when the utilization study was done).
Downtown also has nearly 350 spaces on-street.
The biggest parking lot is at GFL Memorial Gardens, which has about 229 spaces.
"The main finding from our study was that the average parking lot utilization is fairly low across the downtown parking area."
"The utilization rate ranges between 19 per cent to 57 per cent on average. So that's an average across the entire parking area of about 37 per cent," Sabharwal said.
"All of the off-street parking lots were less than 80 per cent for the maximum occupancy, with only the Spring and March parking lot and Heritage parking lot getting close to that 85 per cent threshold.
"Overall, there's no systematic shortage of parking in the area but there are some spots that are more popular than others. But overall, the existing parking supply within the study area was deemed adequate for the downtown area."
The report was accepted by city council as information with no immediate action taken.