SUBMITTED BY KEITH BULLEN, NOTL.
OPINION

Dear editor:

I have finished reading your well-worded editorial on overnight parking in NOTL, (“Russian roulette and overnight parking,” July 18), and it was a good, factual to-the-point opinion piece.

Now get ready for that magic word: But, just to even up the score a bit, let us look at a few more facts.

Yes, there is a parking bylaw and, yes, cars park freely all over Niagara-on-the-Lake during the curfew hours of parking, and when the sun comes up in the morning, generally their windshields are free and clear of parking tickets.

Some of the theatre companies bring in their employees and billet them about town. Not so bad, but some are billeted into houses with one parking spot in the driveway and on a good day two cars can be squeezed into that same driveway.  But (there it is again), there are anywhere from two to six employee cars out front overnight for one residence.

So, the garbage truck, the recycling truck, the brush truck and then the street cleaning truck, and, of course, but not least, the snow clearing truck, all have to make their way, carefully, around these errant overnight parked cars.

The narrow streets of many parts of NOTL do not accommodate cars parked on both sides of the street, which in turn creates an uncomfortable bottleneck for cars travelling both ways.

Overbooking of people with too many cars into rental houses for the theatre season is the culprit, so therefore a parking ticket in conjunction with the present legal bylaw will create revenue for the municipality – and that is not a bad thing.

Keith Bullen 

NOTL