MEDICINE HAT, AB — A section of 6th Avenue SW near the new hospital entrance has been converted to metered parking.
The new pay stations are a first for the city.
Two have been installed between Prospect Drive and 4th Street and came into effect Tuesday morning.
Anyone parking along the block is offered half an hour of free parking, which will be monitored by bylaw.
It’ll cost you $2.50 for every hour after that.
“We have to understand though that parking around the hospital, if we leave it free for everyone, there’s going to be no parking available because a lot of the long term users that maybe work in that area, they take it up throughout the day,” said Randi Buchner, intermediate municipal engineer with the City of Medicine Hat.
The city will be looking at doing a parking review of the entire area surrounding the hospital once construction is complete.
“We want to focus on parking once everything in the area is normalized, so that’s when hospital construction is completed and from our understanding, hospital construction is supposed to be completed by 2020,” she added. “After that time we’d be able to look at parking as a whole and kind of make some changes to better meet the needs of our users.”
