Aggrieved columnist seeking downtown parking spot

When the colossally stupid three-days-in-the-office federal policy came into effect in September I occasionally saw in my various social media feeds complaints from people who couldn’t find parking downtown.

I thought it was weird. Difficult to believe, even. Aren’t there six thousand gazillion places where one can temporarily store one’s private metal box?

Maybe, I reasoned, they meant cheap parking. Perhaps those were public servants not wanting suddenly to spend $20 or $25 a day just to park their car while they endeavoured to sit in an arbitrarily assigned chair in a loud noisy office to do work they were doing more effectively in their home office. A totally normal and rational reaction to being frog-marched downtown for no reason at all.

But no. They meant any parking space, including the pricey. As I recount in my Ottawa Citizen column, if you show up at 9 am, all the parking garages are full and the only spots available (sort of) are on the street and for no longer than two hours. After which you must move your vehicle to a different parking zone because in Ottawa we don’t let you stay longer even if you’re willing to add money to the meter.

I wish I could tell commuters to take transit instead but our system is so unreliable as to be inhumane, with hundreds of buses cancelled everyday, because of maintenance backlogs.

How could OC Transport have let their maintenance backlog be so huge that hundreds of buses have to be cancelled each day and why isn’t anyone being fired over this?

More to the point, why is the mayor silent on this issue? If hundreds of roads were randomly inaccessible each day he’d be thundering righteously from every microphone, assuring us this would get fixed pronto.

Transit users can just go fuck themselves, I guess.

If that’s the message this municipal administration wants us to remember, mission accomplished.