How silly of me to think that the entitlement mentality of Canadians could get any worse. But along comes Dr. Rajendra Kale, editor in chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, who argues that, “Parking fees amount to a user fee in disguise.”
The Vancouver Sun editorial board disagrees with him. But surprise, surprise, Saskatoon’s Tammy Robert does not. She thinks she’s hard done by and whines on Charles Adler’s shoulder about her plight. In other words, Ms. Robert thinks it’s perfectly fine for her fellow taxpayers, including many of whom likely make a whole lot less than her family does, to be paying her bills. That’s pathetic.
Should we expect a Human Rights case to be filed in the not too distant future?!
Personal Note: Earlier this week I was staying at a hotel in San Francisco. They wanted $45/day extra for parking. I said “no way” and found free parking not too far away. If you don’t want to pay for parking then don’t park there!
Show me the Money..Honey It is a labor intensive task to charge parking fees, the fees collected may actually help pay the cost, but all the money plus additional sums go for the Union duds.
Why does everyone think creating those Union Jobs is wise?
BTW
The Costs of a telephone call “Tolled” is = to or less than the cost of Tolling (X2 Xpoints) Sasktel
would save money by not bothering to toll
My parents went to a clinic this past week in ottawa $17 for 2 hours now this was not a hospital this was a clinic which cost wsie alone is bad but at a clinic i don’t see why they need to charge that much.
If you keep giving free parking were does it end???We have handicap parkers that get privledge parking….but 99% have no problem problem: as to actually being disabled…I have seen them roar into the special parking jump out and all but run into the store…If they want to be equal…they are not doing a good job….there is to many of them that can walk with no problem…using the system…then they can’t figure out way people get pissed off..no better than the wefare frauds…and there is alot of them….governments do not want to look into this..///
So you have to pay for parking – is that too much to ask when the Canadian health care is free?
By the way. For all those saying its bad to whine about the parking, consider that hospitals are 100% taxpayer funded here in the Demented Dominion. Hospitals are not private companies in this country. They are -public-.
That means YOU ALREADY PAID. You are getting dinged -twice-. Which IMHO is especially odious considering Grandma might not get lunch if a family member isn’t there to make sure. And at dinner too. $15 a pop. Thirty bucks a day for something y’all already paid for. Seven days a week. How many times you going to walk half a mile in the rain to go visit Grandma, Robert?
So, in the United States its perfectly reasonable for a -private- hospital to charge whatever they want for parking, because its their parking lot. They bought it, they have to pay the mortgage.
But in Canada? Not so much, I think. Can you say rip off? Sure you can! Say it with me now, RIP OFFFFFFFF!
In my experience, it seems that no matter where a hospital is located it has insufficient parking. I can understand this in places like St. Pauls Hospital in Vancouver where I wouldn’t even consider driving nowadays. However, in the small center where I currently live in which one can park downtown easily the hospital has a major shortage of parking space. I have no trouble parking in front the the local airport terminal although the price is a steep $1/hour which the locals complain about.
My solution to this problem has been to ensure that I live close to where I work and it takes me 8 minutes to walk to the hospital; a shorter period of time than some of the people who pay for parking further away than I live. One of the top items on the agenda of every medical staff meetings is the shortage of doctor parking and doctors have given up their hospital privileges due to the high cost of parking. I thought I’d save some time once when I was late for a clinic and drove to the hospital and it took me 15 minutes to find a parking spot; walking would have been far faster.
Given the pervasive nature of the hospital parking shortage it appears that hospital planners have a parking scotoma. People who design hospitals must have some idea of the huge number of people that work in a hospital and the expected number of people that live close enough that they can walk to work. There are probably studies which look at the average number of visitors each hospital patient gets/day and the means by which those people get to the hospital. The local hospital serves a large rural area and one of the complaints I get is that the parking spots are too small for the F350 that a relative of a patient drove in. I’d hate to think what would happen if they had to see someone in a Vancouver hospital.
Based on demand for hospital parking spaces, the hospital parking rates are reasonable as parking is a very scarce resource. Whether this is a deliberate policy designed to boost parking revenues is something that needs to be determined. Rather than demanding free parking people should be asking why this aspect of hospital design has been so systematically ignored throughout the country. What I found amusing was a Florida hospital that I visited that had valet parking at a rate which was cheaper than Canadian hospital parking. Obviously someone there has been thinking about how to make the hospital parking experience less intimidating.
So it looks like that two-tier health care is slowly coming into effect.
The health act doesn’t cover expenses that are not health related, so if the hospital wants to impose user fees, just tack it on to those things not related to health care.
After all, its just those evil rich people that can afford to own a car…..(sarc)
This just hits a little too close to home. I do hate the fact that patients (and often those that have limited means) get hit by parking costs.
But… the land to put that parking lot on i expensive.
I work at a Clinic that has the best parking situation in the City but still probably has half of the parking that patients would like. The raw land for the current parking lot would cost a half a million dollars to purchase today. The size required by today’s zoning law would be well over a million dollars. This is just a family practice clinic.
Our hospital just built a 4 story parkade that cost something like $30 million to hold 800 vehicles. It is ridiculous but the City refused to give any more building permits to the hospital if they didn’t resolve the parking issues in the surrounding community. Somehow that money has to be recovered.
It makes more sense to have the people who use it pay for it.
As far as I know, every hospital offers weekly or monthly passes. Many will allow you to pay for the lot for a couple of days and apply those payments to a pass if you find out you need to come more often.
I cannot believe the whining I’m hearing on this subject. We centralize hospital-level care to take advantage of economies of scale and utilize scarce specialist resources. So now we’ve got mega-hospitals with 5,000 staff, serving 5,000 patients, who have 15,000 visitors, and everyone wants to park right outside the door, for free. Right, sure.
Get a grip. This is why municipalities run money losing bus systems with our tax money. So you can take the bus.
Phantom and Loki are correct. My observations are that this hits the elderly the most who are on limited income, have paid taxes all their lives. This doesn’t hit the leeches of society as they rarely own cars and can usually scam a taxi slip home.
The prices are rediculous because its a monopoly. And I am sure this money is probably going to bureaucrats and other bloated crap rather than parking improvements.
Mike in Calgary writes “langmann: don’t spend ten minutes “driving around.” Spend 30 seconds and call a tow truck.”
Thanks guy, never thought of that. Rather than tow them the security likes to put a tickey on it and try and find the owner by paging incessently overhead.
Free parking as a human right? This is clearly a job for Rosa Parks…
Gov’ts are considering tolls on highways and bridges (in Montreal). Toronto is considering charging people to enter the city to go to work or shop – revenue generating activity. Commercial taxes are deliberately higher to compensate for people from outside the city.
Why not parking fees in hospitals?
We have become a society so inward-looking and today-focused we are forgetting about investing in the future.
Taxes used to go towards infrastructure and building a future. Now, its “my health”, “my kids daycare”. Me, …
Why can people pay so many user fees but not at a hospital??