With the closing date of the Baker Street parking lot and Wyndham Street parking lot approaching, many nearby businesses have expressed concerns with how it will affect their businesses, especially during a pandemic.
Last week, the City of Guelph announced the scheduled closing of the parking lots on Oct. 1 to begin the Baker District redevelopment project. ’
For businesses around those lots, it means more difficulty with access, especially during the winter months.
Sanna Noor, manager of Diana Downtown said parking has always been a concern for the restaurant that has been there since 1986 and with construction limiting parking in the area during the pandemic, the effects of parking on a business became more apparent.
“We would have customers who'd order food and then be like ‘I'm sorry we can't find parking because there's construction everywhere roads are closed. We're not going to pick up our food,” said Noor.
“We would lose sales on that so now of course, the Baker Street parking lot is the only parking lot that's available.”
She said all the restaurants in the area have to share the limited parking spaces on the street. And with the market parkade being nearly a kilometre away, parking in the winter will become a huge issue.
“We will be dependent on foot traffic. We get lots of customers here that are dependent on wheelchairs as well that need accessibility. Again, they won't be able to come to dine because of those issues,” said Noor.
Matt Martindale, of The WORKS Craft Burgers & Beer, said parking has always been a concern for the restaurant throughout the winter.
“It's like a hotbed issue, kind of all over. And we're now eliminating a closed parking lot for our end of the street. So that's a bit that's concerning for sure,” said Martindale. "It's going to be trickier for people to come down to park close, especially people who are a little bit older.”
Martindale said it would help if the city held off on closing the lot until the new year.
Brandon Rennie, co-owner of Gin Mill on Wyndham Street North said many businesses in the uptown Guelph area want the same support from the city and the Downtown Guelph Business Association that the businesses in the dining district were afforded when they were hard hit during the pandemic.
“We want to feel as if the city and the GDBA care even marginally as much about our businesses as they've proven they do about others,” said Rennie.
He said many businesses affected by the parking lot closures were also excluded from the dining district that helped many restaurants survive.
“The solution to save the lucky businesses in the dining district was to divert traffic for an entire summer in 2020 and every summer weekend of 2021,” said Rennie.
“The solution proposed by both the mayor and representatives of the GDBA is to convince people to take a stroll in order to support the businesses barely hanging on post-COVID. I very much doubt even our most fervent supporters will hike from the Market Parkade up to north Wyndham in January.”
