Downtown Cloverdale’s parking situation will be the subject of another study in the coming months, after an initial study done by the City of Surrey in 2016 drew the ire of some business owners.
“We’ve heard and are aware that there are a number of changes that have happened, even in the last two years,” said city planner Steve MacIntyre, the lead planner on the in-progress Cloverdale Town Centre Plan.
- RELATED: Cloverdale reviews new town centre plan
- SEE ALSO: Where country meets contemporary: Cloverdale’s new town centre plan
“So we’re looking at updating that parking study to take into account recent developments and changes to the area.”
The original parking study was done in 2016 to see what needed to change as the city updated the Cloverdale Town Centre Plan, which helps guide development in downtown Cloverdale.
The results of the 2016 study showed that parking was underutilized in the downtown area. It found that of the 446 parking spaces in the core commercial area, an average of 124 were in use over the course of the day. This resulted in some significant changes to the town centre plan, including halving the total area of projected public parking lots and breaking up downtown’s two largest lots along 176A Street to create a condensed lot on 57A Avenue and a larger lot on 56A Avenue.
Local business owners were not pleased.
In a Cloverdale BIA survey released last September, 54 per cent of business owners identified parking as a common problem in the area. More than a third of respondents considered moving their business from Cloverdale in the last year, with around 20 per cent identifying parking as the major factor.
MacIntyre said that he has been in contact with the BIA and other stakeholders about the parking situation in Cloverdale since taking over the project, and is working with them to come up with solutions to the parking problem. He has already come up with a few.
“But I’m not going to tell you what those are,” he added. “We’ve bounced it off a couple of key stakeholders, and I think we’re on the right track based on that.”
“I think we’ve got parking sorted out to a place where we can probably, if not fully satisfy their desires and hopefully get most of the way there,” he added.
The new parking study will get underway in the coming months, and will be completed in time for MacIntyre to use its results to help inform the town centre plan before it goes to council near the end of 2018.
grace.kennedy@cloverdalereporter.comLike us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter
