After years of deliberating, the City of Ottawa finally activated parking meters along the streets of Wellington West and Westboro on Sept. 2.
The city aims to use the program to relieve parking congestion and consistently free up space for customers. But many are left unsatisfied.
The idea of installing these parking meters has long drawn pushback from members of the Westboro and Wellington West communities. Now that they have been switched on for a month, many customers and business owners are hitting road blocks operating with the new rules.
“I don’t work in an office where I can sneak out for 10 minutes and call it a break,” said Morgan Gould, general manager of Fratelli on Richmond Rd. “If there’s customers waiting in the dining room, I’m going nowhere.”
The machines’ two-hour limit has already proven to be a hiccup for local workers parking nearby.
“A lot of my staff are now getting tickets nonstop,” Gould said.
The dissatisfaction extends to customers as well, which in many situations just adds another headache for workers tasked with fielding their patrons’ frustrations, according to Judy Lincoln, the executive director of the Westboro Village BIA.
“Many small business owners and their staff are feeling the burden of explaining it to customers, and taking the brunt of the frustration from customers,” Lincoln told KT in an email. “It is hard. This decision was not the businesses’ or the BIA’s, but the City of Ottawa.”
Aron Slipacoff, executive director of Wellington West’s BIA, said businesses in his neighbourhood also share an overall concern with how the new paid parking is affecting businesses.
“In general, the feeling is that the paid parking is going to drive away foot traffic and drive away business and people will not stop to do their 15 minute shops, they’ll just keep going and they’ll park in the parking lot down the road,” Slipacoff said.
While other popular neighbourhoods across Ottawa, like the Glebe, have had paid parking for years, they don’t lack reliable access to public transit the way Ottawans in Westboro and Wellington West do. The O-Train’s Confederation line won’t extend to a station in Westboro until the rail’s west extension is complete.
The sentiment had the support of Kitchissippi ward councillor Jeff Leiper who, in June 2024, attempted to hold off paid parking in Westboro and Wellington West until the train’s extension improved the neighbourhood’s transit situation. The motion ultimately failed as the city made another step towards activating meters this September.
“Getting to Westboro today is more difficult than it will be when stage two LRT comes into effect,” Leiper said. “But hopefully, by the end of 2026/early 2027, the train is up and running and that will transform the transit trip to Westboro.”
For Leiper, it’s no surprise paid parking is so unpopular.
“No one wants to pay for parking,” he said. “But in general, people will.”
So it begs the question: what purpose is paid parking supposed to serve for Wellington West and Westboro?
“The paid parking is intended to manage the very high demand for parking that’s in Westboro in Wellington West,” Leiper said. “For years I have heard from merchants the frustrations they express on behalf of their customers that parking is difficult to find.”
And over the past decade, the area has become more and more popular to the point where parking now comes at a premium. In a July press release, the city said its decision to implement paid parking in the area was based on data collected from a 2023 study on parking in Kitchissippi. The study found parking occupancy in Wellington West and Westboro had been steadily increasing since 2014. In many places, that often exceeded the agreed upon practical capacity of 85 per cent.
Put simply, parking in Westboro and Wellington West has been in short supply, so paid parking is intended to open spaces so new customers can park.
“If the neighbourhood gets a reputation for one in which parking is hard to find, that’s a drag on business,” Leiper said. “So the advantage of having paid parking is to try to encourage parking turnover and the availability of spots so that when people want to visit our neighborhoods, they are reasonably assured that they’ll be able to find a parking spot that’s convenient to where they want to go.
“It is a worthwhile goal to try to ensure that parking is available to support our local businesses and this is a key tool in doing that.”
It’s a positive impact Gould has already noticed in the area, with an asterisk or two.
“It has opened up a lot more parking for people who want to just jump in and make a quick stop,” Gould said. “On the other hand, the machines never seem to work.”
Gould said the meters’ two-hour time limit also risks discouraging customers from dining and shopping freely around the neighbourhood.
“As a restaurant, people want to come to Westboro to go for lunch and to go shopping and now we’re finding people who are telling us they can only do one or the other,” Gould said.