For residents who regularly need to do business or visit the downtown core as a requirement of their daily lives, the cost of downtown parking is a severe burden. There is lots of off street parking, it just is not cost effective if one needs to use it more often than a few time during the year. Try attending multiple meetings at City Hall every week, to try to say on top of municipal affairs. Most meetings run 2 hours or more, and for parking close to City Hall that means Scotia Square if you want to find parking close at hand without having to regularly leave these meetings to plug a parking meter. Not inexpensive at all. There should not be a financial impediment for residents who wish attend public meetings held at City Hall. So what is the solution for the concerned citizen who wants to attend these meetings without having to spend a significant part of their family budget to do so. Parking far away and taking a regular bus in to City Hall only works if one wants to give up the whole day to the evolution; but if one still has to get back to work it is not effective solution. Perhaps a few park and ride (P&R) locations with with a connecting express bus service whose fares are incorporated into the P&R parking fee.... the parking ticket stub would act as a round-trip ticket for the express bus. The express bus operational hours would cover off City Hall business hours. This P&R and express bus solution would also work well for many downtown office workers, and get less vehicles traveling into the downtown core area. Creatively the P&R locations could be built underground, beneath existing open space and community parks recreational spaces; the open space, and parks would still exist above these P&R structures. The time it would take to pay back the development costs of such P&R locations would not be short term due to the reduced parking charges, but the benefits to HRM would be equally long term.

Steve Mackie's deltoids are chiseled from granite