Driveway law invoked in east end
An old bylaw saying you can’t park in your driveway if there’s no garage has been invoked in an unspecified but suburbanish part of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Residents are peeved after doing so for many years. Why one resident took it upon themselves to urge the city to enforce this odd law hasn’t been made clear.
Ephraim 12:17 on 2023-01-26 Permalink
The borough has some responsibility here… when they gave the permit to convert the garage, they should have required that the driveway be converted to green space, if it was illegal to park there. But they didn’t, they allowed it to remain, which suggests that it was still legal. Likely, this will end up in the courts (and my guess, any reasonable judge will say the same thing and throw out the tickets and require the city to rewrite the bylaw.)
DeWolf 13:02 on 2023-01-26 Permalink
As usual, the CTV article leaves out a lot of important details (what is it with CTV?), such as the specific location (it’s Place de Boucherville near Honoré-Beaugrand metro) and the fact that many of the garages had been illegally converted into living spaces.
TVA has more detail: https://www.tvanouvelles.ca/2023/01/24/la-ville-interdit-les-voitures-dans-leur-entree-de-maison-1
This seems like a weird bureaucratic quirk that can easily be solved. In the meantime there’s not exactly a shortage of street parking on this quiet dead-end street with no parking restrictions. But I’m not surprised the media is all over this, because, you know, in the war on cars, every driver is a victim.
DeWolf 13:05 on 2023-01-26 Permalink
@Ephraim, according to TVA, some of the conversions were illegal, and the homeowners that did them legally had the obligation of removing the parking space, which obviously they neglected to do.
Sucks for the current homeowners but we’re talking about things that were done 45 years ago…
jeather 13:10 on 2023-01-26 Permalink
It looks like a rule set up to avoid people paving over their entire front lawn, which strikes me as reasonable. Some neighbour got mad about who knows what — maybe they wanted to do the same conversion and found out the rule? — and complained.
dhomas 14:57 on 2023-01-26 Permalink
I did not know this was illegal, probably like most everyone else. There are tons of these on my block. If I was a jerk, I could cause trouble for A LOT of people. If you start here and go around the block, you’ll see at least a dozen examples:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.5903597,-73.5431226,3a,75y,353.91h,64.84t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sMg3_u5YKG5P0eRi-zBY50w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192
I always thought it was very ugly, but not illegal.
DeWolf 15:02 on 2023-01-26 Permalink
The northeast corner of Rosemont and most of St-Michel is full of buildings whose owners have covered their front yard with asphalt so they can use it as parking. You can see it a lot in the Petit Maghreb. There usually aren’t any curb cuts for these de facto parking lots, so they’re probably illegal. For whatever reason the boroughs involved haven’t seen fit to crack down.
Kate 18:55 on 2023-01-26 Permalink
So wait, if the car goes on a strip of asphalt next to the house, it’s fine? But if it sits on a strip of asphalt so that when it’s parked it’s pointing AT a part of the house, it’s illegal?
jeather 20:25 on 2023-01-26 Permalink
Right, the driveway has to point at a garage or to the back yard, but not at the house unless it was there before 74 — I am sure this is set up to restrict covering the entire front as parking (a garage is only so wide). It seems like an entirely sensible law (which I had no idea existed until yesterday either).