Inside Langford

Many of the residents of the North end of Scafe Road believe their street has been inundated with parking from recent multi-unit buildings on nearby streets. A resident near the south end of Scafe is not so sure. City Hall has some different ideas yet again. So what’s really going on?

The part of Scafe Road in question is roughly in the centre of the group of streets between Goldstream Ave, Veteran’s Memorial, the Transcanada Highway, and Jacklin Road. It’s a single-family dwelling neighbourhood, but has been flagged by City Hall for redevelopment to match the three and four-storey multi-unit buildings propping up on nearby streets like Deville, Brock, and Peatt.

Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I lived on Scafe Road for many years (it was the street my family moved to when we came to Langford when I was 16, back in the 1980s). That said, I moved to my current house in 1996 and the Scafe Road area has changed significantly since I lived there. The only thing I can state with a certainty is that these problems didn’t exist then. Those changes are what many of the current residents of Scafe Road feel are the source of the parking problem.

The issue first came up on August 12th at the Transportation and Public Works Committee meeting. Several Scafe Road residents had complained to City Hall that on-street parking had become horrific, with some houses having as many as six cars parked in front of them on the street. They argued that nothing on Scafe itself had changed, so the problem must be due to the influx of new residents in the existing multi-unit buildings, or construction workers working on new ones going up.

City Hall staff visited Scafe and looked at those possibilities. Langford’s chief Engineer said that staff had concluded that “it didn’t appear to be construction workers,” as the cars were still there after the end of the work day. As for it being residents of nearby multi-unit buildings, they noted that not all of the parking spots in the nearest new development were occupied.

A member of the committee noted, as it had been during the recent discussion of Revilo, that the area’s “garages are full of yachts and lawnmowers, there’s not a car in them.” Of course, that observation doesn’t suggest a solution as it’s not possible to legislate what people do with their garages.

The committee discussed the possibility of turning downtown greenspace into parking, and then reclaiming it as greenspace once traffic concerns die down when commuter rail becomes a reality. Langford’s engineer noted that “that’s a strategy,” but it was also quickly noted by another committee member that “once you lose greenspace you’ll never get it back.”

Some members of the committee argued that they believed that a lot of the houses on Scafe have suites. That may or may not be true, but the question is do they have more suites now than before since this is a very recent problem?

Denise Blackwell offered, as he has on other occasions when the topic of parking for multi-unit buildings comes up, that when she used to live in a condo where there were ten units and only 5 cars amongst them, two of them for her family. This anecdotal observation on her part is clearly not typical, however, given the feedback City Hall has been receiving from neighbourhoods on the issue of parking in areas where density has increased recently.

Transportation Committee members toyed with the idea at that August 12th meeting of doing permit-only parking for the entire area (not just Scafe) but Langford’s engineer recommended against that, noting that a “consultant concluded we don’t have a shortage of parking downtown.”

It was clear that as strongly as the residents felt it was the nearby condos, that there were many who felt equally strongly that it had nothing to do with the condos. Committee member, and local developer, Les Bjola said “One of my tenants has 6 cars,” and it was further noted that “we’ve got a major long-term problem.”

The question of how long until Scafe Road joined other neighbouring streets in getting redeveloped. Langford’s engineer responded to that by saying “we’ve got a vision,” for what the area will look like in the future. As to how long it would take for all of the area to get redeveloped? “My guess, a generation.”

In a future post Inside Langford will look at what Langford Council’s take on this issue was when it came before their August 18th meeting, as well as what a resident of Strathmore (near the south-end of Scafe) had to say about it. Unless a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys novel, this story may not read through to a convenient, open-and-shut ending, given people don’t yet agree on what the source of the problem is, let alone what the solution might be.

– Steven Hurdle -

Update: Here is that future post.