Letter to the Editor - RE: Gabriola ferry – dogs and parking
Dear Sir,
I’ve ridden the Gabriola ferry five days a week for over a year and have a couple of suggestions. Thanks for taking time to read them.
Dogs: There are two signs near the doors to the passenger areas on the Gabriola ferry, one prohibiting “pets,” and the other warning students about the consequences of bad behaviour. Since the rule prohibiting pets (i.e. dogs) is blatantly broken by adults every day right in front of the ferry staff, it seems a bit of a double standard to assume students should obey the signs ordering them to behave. Why not remove the signs from one of the four passenger areas and let everybody with a dog sit in that one? Either that or leave the signs up and enforce the rules posted for both pets and for bad behaviour.
Parking: There is a small paved parking lot with about 40 spaces near the Gabriola ferry dock on the Gabriola side. About half the spaces, the very best ones closest to the dock, are reserved for ferry staff, who park there while working their shifts. The rest are free of charge and are usually all taken by the passengers riding the first ferry in the morning, who leave their cars there all day.
For the rest of the day everybody else (seniors, mothers with small children, people going over to Nanaimo for medical reasons, etc.) get to park across the road and up a steep hill on several private lots, which mostly consist of dirt or broken pavement), and pay $2 a day to do it.
The hill and pay parking lots are so steep that they’re inaccessible when the roads are snow-covered or icy, and the owner actually blocks the entrance to the lots, which means during winter conditions there is no parking at the ferry terminal for most passengers. Not very many businesses would take over half the best parking spaces for their staff, give away the rest of the best parking spaces for free for the whole day, and then force nearly all the rest of their customers to walk up a steep hill to pay a parking lot run by somebody else. In fact they’d probably do the exact opposite: make a parking lot for their employees somewhere away from the front of the business, charge for the best parking spaces to keep them open for customers who need them most and are willing to pay for them, and provide a cheaper place to park for customers who don’t mind a little walk to save some money.
Yours truly,
~ Robert Hess