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Lansdowne has a lot of car-related problems. It was deliberately meant to be discomfiting to drivers, in the hope they’d be cautious and tentative. This works in other cities but Ottawa’s still getting the hang of it. Drivers at Lansdowne parked in the no-parking plaza outside the movie theatre as soon as it opened, until no-parking signs went up on every pole around. They had to have lines painted for them on the paving stones because they couldn’t keep out of the pedestrian spaces. Metal bollards have been replaced with cheap bendy plastic ones; drivers kept plowing into the nicer ones and denting them. Bike racks and wooden benches have all been rammed.

And that’s just the stuff that isn’t supposed to happen. The South Court is often a staging area for events inside the pavilion, crowded with trailers and trucks and vans and often blocked off altogether with fences.

Some of that’s fine, Dark says. The Aberdeen Pavilion has no loading dock and no backstage and things have to be set up somewhere. But it risks becoming a habit — people don’t use the space because it’s always being parked on, and then it’s OK to park there because nobody uses it.

“I had always thought that one of the reasons for spending a lot of money (on Lansdowne) was you would just program it like crazy,” Dark says. “It should be the kind of place where you couldn’t park a car because there’s just so much stuff going on. … If it’s a Wednesday night and there’s nothing else, you say, ‘Sorry, you can’t park there because there’s 200 schoolkids there for an event because we’re only charging them $5 for the space.'”

In Toronto, they give you a ticket if you even think of parking something in a place you aren’t supposed to, he says, though enforcement isn’t the whole story. You’d never just drive your car onto a Rideau Canal pathway and leave it there, because it’s full of people. Not so with a lot of the spaces around the Aberdeen Pavilion.

“What I would hope is that over a period of time, it just gets so used and programmed that it doesn’t happen any more,” Dark says.

dreevely@postmedia.com

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