Why offering more free parking won’t help
The city returned free parking to the Centre Claude‑Robillard recently, and wants to extend free parking to other city facilities. This piece lays out why this may not be a good idea, as drivers often avail themselves of the free spots even though they’re not using the facilities at all.
Joey 11:15 on 2026-03-24 Permalink
Claude-Robillard is kind of an edge case because it’s adjacent to paid CEGEP parking lots. An easy compromise would be for the city to mimic how hospitals work – first two (or however many you want) hours are free and then you have to pay. Then again, this sounds like a solution in search of a problem – if it is indeed the case that pool users can’t find parking because the CEGEP students grabbed them all, there’s value in acting. Otherwise it’s more hypothetical than everything (and don’t discount how much crap people have to schlep to things like swim practice, etc.).
azrhey 12:05 on 2026-03-25 Permalink
When I lived in London, there was free parking at the (given) private pool I frequented. You could drive into the parking easily but to drive out you needed a bar code parking ticket that you could only inside the locker rooms. So it was assumed that if you got all the way inside the locker room, you were entitled to a parking ticket to get out of the parking for free.
I guess something similar could be done here? (mind you I don’t know how the Centre Claude-Robillard works, so that might not be feasible)