A Simple Plan

How to turn around the downtown in Stoney Creek, insofar as parking goes...?

1) Get rid of metered street parking in Downtown Stoney Creek. (City of Hamilton purview.)

2) Increase the number of parking passes made available to business owners and their employees. (City of Hamilton purview.)

3) Do an actual study of parking space use in the downtown. (Not within the City of Hamilton purview. Although I'm sure a strategic alliance could be formed with them by concerned parties.)

4) Once this has been completed, begin addressing the issue of the cause-and-effect of the Health Sciences Building monopolizing parking spaces in Municipal Lot #3. (Not within the City of Hamilton purview. Although I'm sure a strategic alliance could be formed with them by concerned parties.)

5) Initiate a 'master plan' regarding potential changes in land use in Downtown Stoney Creek. (Not within the City of Hamilton purview. Although I'm sure a strategic alliance could be formed with them by concerned parties.)

6) Initiate a 'master plan' regarding the sincere revitalizing of Downtown Stoney Creek. (Not within the City of Hamilton purview. Although I'm sure a strategic alliance could be formed with them by concerned parties.)

Successfully addressing the 'situation' in Downtown Stoney Creek is not one where 'the government', no matter what manifestation at what level we're talking, should be the crux. 

It is not 'the government's' responsibility to effect changes such as those desperately required in Downtown Stoney Creek. That is not any government's role. 

That having been said, it is 'the government's' role to enhance opportunities, to provide the best circumstances possible for success, to encourage and support commerce energies being utilized to their maximum potential. 


So no, Downtown Stoney Creek is not 'the government's' problem to solve. 

And, to a certain extent, it's not 'the public's', either. And yet...it can certainly be an active player, because this has to do with the quality of Life that people in the area, people who might frequent Downtown Stoney Creek might experience. It's not the public's responsibility to make sure their retail and entertainment and service needs are addressed to their satisfaction. The public...in this sense, 'the consuming public'...vote with their dollars. Except when there's a vacuum, a bubble, except when someone somehow has pressed 'Pause'...and it's stuck in that mode. 

This capitalist, materialistic society of ours was built as a result of businesspeople who took what was available to them...their own initiative, their own resources...and combined them with the momentum of the times, of opportunities as laid out on the landscape. 

Throughout all of this 'discussion'...which I myself have co-opted from the bitchfest about the City of Hamilton forcing metered parking down our collective throats into one addressing Downtown Stoney Creek's actual vibrancy and thriving nature...'the government' has been consistently presented as 'The Bad Guy'. And quite frankly, it's frustrated the Hell out of me that this tack has been so convenient and so powerful a distractor. Because in the end, as I've been saying for almost a year now, the issue isn't about metered parking. It's something of a much greater impact, something of a much greater importance, something that nobody seems to want to address. (Not even our community newspaper, The Stoney Creek News.)

Which is why I'll keep yammering-on about it. 

Not just because it's in my innate nature to be the grain of sand that prompts the pearl. (Though I do like that sentiment and am considering fashioning it into a t-shirt...)

It's because Stoney Creek deserves what's long been absent: a vibrant and thriving downtown. 

Period.