Scott Hallam stands by one of the many empty parking spaces in Centretown that could be leased to clients for daytime parking. Hallam’s online parking hub was recently halted by Ottawa bylaw officials.
Anyone attempting to park a car in downtown Ottawa knows it can be an ordeal.
Unintelligible signs and overcrowded streets sit alongside empty alleyways and driveways.
A car trip to the core can be daunting, but Scott Hallam, a business student at Algonquin College, saw an opportunity.
Together with his cousin, John Hallam, he drew up plans for an online hub where property owners with unused parking spaces could link up with drivers who are willing to pay for a steady parking spot.
“We’d been noticing that people all over the city were starting to do this (on an individual basis),” Hallam says.
“It seemed like a logical way to improve congestion,” he says.
They built and tested an online system where, for a small fee, any homeowner could list their vacant driveway space for rent.
“It worked pretty well,” Scott Hallam says. A short time later, ParkInMyDriveway.com was born.
Their first market research survey showed strong interest from downtown homeowners, with 60 per cent of respondents indicating they would use the service if they had unused space.
Local business improvement areas began to inquire about the website. “They have a need right now.
In a lot of the areas, there are a lot of businesses there, but not a lot of parking spots,” Scott Hallam says. “We wanted to allow some of the surrounding homeowners to rent out their driveways.”
When the BIAs told other city departments about the idea, the website’s prospects hit a major snag.
Scott Hallam says that although bylaw enforcement initially approved their plan, more discussions between city departments led to the city rejecting the idea.
“We were just about to launch,” Scott Hallam says. “Now we’re having to redevelop the system when it was almost completely done.”
According to city zoning bylaws, a parking spot can only be used by the owner or tenant adjacent to it.
Residents can’t rent out parking space to others.
A driveway needs to be re-zoned as commercial property or a special motion needs to be passed by city council for an owner to be allowed to lease the space. Neither of those procedures happens very often.
Another much larger business called Parkingspots.com lists two residential parking spots for hire in Centretown.
However, its media contact, Aynsley Deluce, says there are two differences between what they do and what ParkInMyDriveway.com attempted to do.
“We leave (transactions) to the discretion of the property owner,” Deluce says.
Parkingspots.com, which operates in Canada and the United States, only collects a fee on parking spots from commercial or industrial property, while residential spots are listed for free.
According to Deluce, if bylaw enforcement were to discover a rented residential parking spot, the website would not be held responsible.
“We did that intentionally. We knew that certain cities have restrictions,” Deluce says.
The Hallams have put the business on hold for now. Scott Hallam says he wants to retool the site to provide a free “parking swap” service.
They envision a site where people can share driveway space with each other when it’s needed.
They say they have even offered their idea to be part of Ottawa’s Transportation Master Plan. City officials have not yet responded to their offer.