Dear Editor,
As Canadians, many of us can hum or sing along to Joni Mitchell’s Pave Paradise and as we hum along momentarily feel we have landed on some moral high ground: “uh huh, those nasty parking lots!”
Yet virtually everyone who lives in Tobermory drives a car. All our visitors – who sustain the working population – arrive here by car.
We contentedly – happily even, despite our environmental concerns – live in an automobile centred society and will almost certainly continue to do so for a long time.
When we’re at home we park in our driveways but when we go to Owen Sound or Sauble or Toronto we park, probably without much thought, in a parking lot. And, if we took the time to think about it, we’d be glad some urban planners somewhere had the foresight to consider our parking needs of the moment.
Full disclaimer: on a personal note in 2014 after almost three decades away I was enormously grateful to find a good long-term job in my home town with the Blue Heron Company. This company is now one of the two proposing the construction of additional parking to better serve its customers and visitors to our community.
I appreciated a number of the points raised by Councillor Golden in her letter in a recent edition of this paper (Issue #11, 2021). Council, in being responsive to the needs of property owners and residents, has eliminated a lot of parking. There is good reason to argue more needs to be done on this front, I mention Harpur Drive in particular. While parking availability has declined, both Parks Canada and the MNBP for various reasons have been unable or unwilling to provide much needed designated visitor parking.
Working frontline, as I do, it’s a definite pleasure serving customers and in so doing being able to say: “It’s okay to leave your car, take your time, enjoy a meal or a wander around the village after your cruise”. Likewise, it’s miserable on busy days in peak season when customers circle the town and circle again and again looking for a place to park and ream out our young student staff (or me) because no parking is to be found anywhere.
Some folks have objected to the proposed new parking lots, saying “if you build it, then they will come”. That might be true in some parts of the MNBP as yet relatively undeveloped but it shows a lack of understanding of the reality of Tobermory: “they” are already here.
For several years now Parks Canada has significantly reduced and capped Flowerpot Island visitation as well as at almost all mainland destinations. Meanwhile, at peak periods people still circle the town for want of parking. This really is not about “more”, it’s about provision for what is.
From where I sit, while parking is not a “motherhood and apple pie” issue, it seems to me that Bruce Anchor and Blue Heron are doing the taxpayers a public service by taking on and addressing the need for visitor parking. With many levels of oversight and planning, the parking lots are being created in such a way that when the magical (or dismal?) time arrives that Tobermory no longer relies on tourism or we as a society no longer rely on the automobile, the lots will revert to nature within a generation.
Retired residents have no need of a local job, but all the people who work in Tobermory depend on a strong tourist based economy. And it’s worth noting, many a pension fund is connected to big energy and/or the automobile.
Yours respectfully
Hazel Smith,
Tobermory
