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Residential street parking in most of Vancouver is free. A pollution charge was proposed to start in two years, billed at $500 to $1,000 a year, on street-parked, gas-fuelled sports cars, SUVs and trucks, but it was struck down 6-5 in a municipal vote.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press

In January, 2019, Vancouver’s newly elected city council passed this motion: “The breakdown of the stable climate and sea level under which human civilization developed constitutes an emergency for the City of Vancouver.”

It was the early days of an emerging trend of cities declaring a “climate emergency.” As of mid-2021, more than 500 Canadian municipalities had passed similar motions. Like the nuclear-free zones of the 1980s, the words were as easy to adopt as they were to say. Vancouver passed its motion unanimously. Then the fighting started.

This week, unanimous climate ambition ran smack into that perennially fraught swamp of civic debate: parking.

Residential street parking in most of Vancouver is free. The houses are worth millions, but the pavement out front, built and maintained by taxpayers, can be driven on at no cost, and usually parked on gratis, too. In the first main policy plank of Vancouver’s climate emergency effort – the overall aim is to cut emissions by half by 2030 – the city proposed charging $45 a year – that’s 12 cents a day – for overnight street parking. Low-income car owners would pay a little more than one cent a day. Thereafter, a “pollution charge” would start in two years, billed at $500 to $1,000 a year, on street-parked, gas-fuelled sports cars, SUVs and trucks, bought in 2023 or after.

The proposal failed, in a 6-5 vote on Wednesday, with the left-leaning mayor siding with right-leaning councillors. Free Parking 1, Climate Emergency 0.

The issue is at once simple and complicated. Charging for parking should be a no-brainer. Street parking shouldn’t be free – it’s a taxpayer subsidy for drivers. And in Vancouver today, it’s a subsidy for some and not others. In the West End, adjacent to downtown, with a below-average median income and a majority of renters, street parking costs $401 a year. In Toronto, roughly half of residential street parking is paid, and the cheapest permit is $233. Montreal’s system is similar to what Vancouver had in mind, with rates that vary by area and vehicle. An electric vehicle in the Plateau pays $164; a gas-guzzler pays $263.

Vancouver’s plan was pitched as being about climate, but it was also about raising money. City staff said overnight street parking could have raised $40-million over four years, alongside $32-million from the pollution charge. The money could have funded a package that included street work to speed up buses, planting trees, improved pedestrian infrastructure, and EV charging stations for apartment buildings. All of which could be branded as addressing a global climate crisis – or as being mostly about local quality of life.

But if taxpayer-subsidized parking is too controversial a topic for Vancouver’s elected officials to tackle, how about thornier issues such as a congestion charge? Vancouver council last year exiled that topic to the purgatory of a feasibility study.

The goal of a congestion charge is not to reduce the number of people coming into the city centre. The aim is to have fewer of them arriving by car. Assuming an extensive public transit system offering an alternative to drivers, a congestion charge may make sense. But the target of such a charge is more traffic than carbon. A road gridlocked with EVs is no more or less gridlocked.

Then there’s jurisdiction. On climate, the most important powers rest with Ottawa and the provinces – from carbon taxes to vehicle standards to deep pockets to subsidize things such as transit. In Metro Vancouver, with 21 municipalities, of which the City of Vancouver is but one, local measures to tackle the global atmosphere run the risk of being idle gestures, or creating a patchwork of conflicting local rules.

Charging $45 a year for street parking in Vancouver was not a radical imposition. A pollution charge, to nudge Vancouverites to buy EVs, is less clear cut. The charge would have applied only to Vancouver street parkers, and wouldn’t have been paid by anyone who can afford a driveway or garage, or residents of Metro Vancouver’s other 20 municipalities.

Does that make sense? And is taxing people into buying an EV really a city council’s role?

On parking, Vancouver chose wrong. Climate rhetoric failed to overcome a law of political physics: People don’t want to pay for what has long been “free.” And free parking was supposed to have been the easy part. Vancouver council’s commitment to its avowed climate emergency looks kind of empty.

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