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Hard to know. The city is currently doing a “central area parking study”, so its numbers are a little dated and under revision. By last estimate, there are 11,172 spaces “off-street” in the central area — 2,540 east of the Canal and 8,632 to the west. Of the total, the city has seven of its own parking sites with 1,752 spaces.

One hardly needs a Sherlock to find clues to the current mystery. The large surface lot at Queen and Kent streets has been given over to LRT construction, the Laurier and O’Connor bike lanes ate up some spaces and the NAC is currently down 100 spots due to multi-year construction. The Elgin re-do, which will take two years, has already cut parking as well.

Portions of Queen have been beat up for so long, on the other hand, I forget if there was ever on-street parking there. No doubt there are lots of other losses in capacity here and there.

New builds don’t always help. The new Department of Finance building on Elgin, for instance, has no public parking, nor enough parking for a good portion of the staff.

The immediate impact of LRT is probably being overplayed too. Not only does the first leg end westerly at Tunney’s Pasture, but how does this help business-related travel when employees are nowhere near a station or in a big, jeezly hurry?

(The city is so worried about the problem, I couldn’t get a soul on the phone this week to talk about the issue.)

This is the future, one supposes: the city doesn’t particularly want you to use your car — downtown, maybe anywhere, the private sector has run out of places to park it, the economics of deep underground parking lots no longer make sense, and nobody but other motorists is interested in your whining.

First we paved paradise. Now we’ve shut up the parking lot.

To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@postmedia.com.

Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn