No More Parking Meters
Fix the basics / main streets
Stop feeding the meter.
A parking meter is a toll on shopping local. The big box store doesn’t charge you to park. The strip plaza with the giant lot doesn’t charge you to park. But pull over on an Ottawa main street to grab a coffee or pick up a prescription, and the city has its hand out before the shop does.
So here is the next plank in Alex Lawson’s platform, and it’s a simple one: every on-street parking meter comes out, and no posted parking limit anywhere in the city will be shorter than two hours.
Parking got more expensive on purpose
In the busiest parts of town, paid parking used to end at 5:30. Now it runs to 7:30, six days a week. In September 2025 the city put meters along Richmond Road and Wellington Street West, on streets that never had one before, and wrote nearly 3,000 tickets in Westboro, Wellington West and Hintonburg in the two months that followed. All of that squeeze bought the city about seven cents on the dollar: $19.62 million collected, $17.13 million spent running it, $1.3 million left for the reserve fund. By the city’s own per-space measure, the average meter cleared $95 for the year. The return is a rounding error. The damage to main streets is not.
The rule
On-street parking in Ottawa becomes what it already is on most streets in the city: free. The pay stations come off the sidewalk and the app goes away. Where turnover matters, on main streets and in front of shops, the tool is a posted time limit, and no posted limit will be shorter than two hours. Enough time to eat a meal, sit through an appointment, or walk the length of the street and spend money in more than one place. A sign that says two hours has done that job for a hundred years, and it doesn’t send anybody a ticket for coming back four minutes late.
The 2025 expansion goes first
Pulling 4,337 meters takes a schedule. Switching them off takes a decision. On day one, paid parking stops and everywhere goes back to being free. The meters that went in along Richmond Road and Wellington Street West in September 2025 are the first to be removed.
What it doesn’t touch
This is about meters, not safety. No-stopping zones, fire routes, rush-hour clearances, school zones, loading zones, and accessible parking spaces all stay exactly as they are. Winter overnight parking bans stay, because the plows have to get through. The city’s parking garages and surface lots keep operating and keep charging. And bylaw officers stop walking the meters and spend that time on the rules that protect people: blocked hydrants, fire routes, accessible spaces, school zones.
Straight talk on the money
Parking revenue in Ottawa doesn’t pay for your rec centre or your road. Under the city’s own policy, the parking program pays for itself and whatever is left goes to a reserve fund for future parking projects. So this plan is costed against the parking program, not property taxes. The city gives up every on-street dollar, and Alex won’t pretend otherwise. But in 2025 the city spent $7.42 million running on-street parking and another $710,000 studying it, and most of that spending goes out the door with the meters. The garages and lots, which stay, cover the program’s administration and studies on their own. And the reserve fund the meters feed opened this year at $22.1 million, above its own $20 million ceiling. It is full. Every year, in public, the city will report what the meters cost to take out, what it stopped collecting, and what it stopped spending. The full plank shows the math.
Ottawa deserves better.