A Vancouver motorcycling advocate has claimed that council is about to sign off on some of the most expensive motorcycle parking in the world.

“San Francisco has a combination of both paid and free [parking],” Ian Tootill told the Straight by phone. “Their paid parking—and I know about San Francisco because I used to live there—is the gold standard for rip-off on the West Coast of North America. It is some of the most expensive parking around, yet they just raised their parking price for motorcycles to 40 cents an hour. Forty cents is a fraction of the price that Vancouver is suggesting motorcyclists should pay for parking.”

That’s assuming the Vision Vancouver-dominated council adopts updated staff recommendations at today’s (May 18) meeting at 2 p.m. As the first item of unfinished business, councillors will vote on accepting several amendments to an April 20 staff report dealing with on-street parking for people with motorcycles and scooters.

However, according to Tootill, it is not close to what he worked with COPE councillor David Cadman to draft late last year, where the proposal was just on-street provision of parking for motorcycles and could be summed up in one easy sentence: “Change the bylaw and put some green paint on the curb and you’re done.”

Now the motion has been referred back to staff, and Mayor Gregor Robertson has added a list of amendments that, among other things, stipulate that the parking must be provided for “zero emission” motorcycles, including motor-assisted cycles and electric motorcycles.

“They are picking on the wrong people by doing that,” Tootill said. “Basically, the zero-emission guys have already got incentives. They can park on the sidewalks already. We are not tripping over zero-emissions bikes on the sidewalks. They are all over the place and no one cares. They are already getting tax breaks, and they are already getting the pleasure of doing something good for the environment.”

To boot, Tootill said that the report still asks that motorcycles, which already park illegally all over the city, must still take up space in an on-street parking spot. Rather than pay what a car pays, a recommendation in the latest report stipulates motorcycle riders—assuming they all have a cellphone like Tootill does—can dial in to City Hall and get a 50-percent reduction. Tootill said this means that, in the event that a motorcyclist finds a stall and takes up the whole spot, the city loses 50 percent of that stall’s revenue and the problem is still not solved for the motorcyclist.

“And why are they offering tiered pricing for motorcycles on the basis of emissions when they don’t do that for other vehicles?” Tootill said.

For Cadman, these are germane questions. He said the proposed system, if adopted by council, would need to be reviewed.

“We need to go back and look at it and see what the effect is,” Cadman said via cellphone. “If the effect is that nobody is using these end parking spots, that’s important for us to know. If the effect is that everyone is taking up entire parking spots, and we are losing 50 percent of the revenue, that’s important for us to know. I think it’s important to know what the comparators are, with not only other parking in the city—EasyPark allows 50-cent-an-hour motorcycle parking—but more importantly with other jurisdictions.”

Cadman said he would have preferred it if Vision had not punted his original motion to city staff. The original recommendation would simply have said we should “allow them to park in the end triangles,” he added.

According to Cadman, that’s not what came back from staff.

“It’s come back from staff with a recommendation with regard to zero-emission vehicles, which was really not part of my initial recommendations, but in fairness was part of the Greenest City task force recommendations,” Cadman said. “So, what that has done is bring these two together. I don’t think there are four to eight thousand electric vehicles out there right now—at least not permitted ones. And the other ones, which are more or less bicycles, can park on the sidewalk as if they were a bicycle. What we have now is equal access to these spaces by both gasoline-powered and electric motorcycles.”