Councillors try to untangle discombobulated mess of parking rules on Simpson Street

Simpson Street is hardly a kilometre long, a quiet residential drive from the old Sault Area Hospital site to Mount St. Joseph.

And here, as laid out in the city’s traffic bylaw, is everything you need to know about the parking prohibitions there:

• on the east side of Simpson Street from Wellington Street for 30 metres south, no parking is allowed, ever
• on the east side from 30 metres south of Wellington to 54 metres south of Wellington, you can’t park from Nov. 1 to April 1
• on the east side from 54 metres south of Wellington to Queen Street, there’s no parking anytime
• on the west side of Simpson Street from Queen Street for 270 metres north, you're allowed to park, but not between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. and from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.
• on the west side from Wellington for 65 metres south, parking is always prohibited
• on the west side from six metres south of the north limit of 175 Simpson, to 10 metres north of the north limit of the same address, parking is always prohibited
• on the west side from Queen St. for 104 metres north, you must never, ever park

Why this snarly snakepit of rules for a quiet residential street?

"Prohibited parking on most of Simpson Street is due to the former Sault Hospitals being located on Queen Street, the former paid parking doctors' office building on the corner of Queen and Simpson and the Alex Muir Public School which had access onto Simpson Street prior to its closure," says Carl Rumiel, the city's manager of design and transportation engineering.

"With the hospital move to the north end of the city in 2010, the repurposing of the former doctors' building to a real estate office without paid parking and the closure of Alex Muir Public School nearly 20 years ago, the need for parking restrictions on Simpson Street has changed significantly," Rumiel says in a report prepared for Tuesday's meeting of City Council.

"In May of 2021, the city surveyed the residents to determine what the consensus would be regarding parking prohibitions. Homeowners were asked if they preferred to keep all parking prohibitions as is or would rather remove all parking prohibitions with the exception of winter parking."

"While there was no definitive consensus on the issue, the most common comment given to staff was that parking should be allowed on one side of the street."  

On Tuesday, Rumiel will ask councillors to retain existing  parking restrictions on the east side of Simpson Street from Queen to Wellington, and to remove all prohibitions on the west side.

Tuesday's City Council meeting will be livestreamed on SooToday starting at 4.30 p.m.