A Commentary by Doug Draper
Now wait a minute. Wasn’t it just a little over three weeks ago this March, at an official ribbon cutting gala for Niagara Health System’s new hospital in west St. Catharines that was orchestrated in concert Niagara, Ontario’s Sun Media newspapers, that we were treated to one NHS honcho after another praising themselves over the great vision and planning that went into this hospital?
A computerized rendition of Niagara’s new hospital in west St. Catharines.
And now – less than a week after the hospital’s March 24 official opening and a media release from the NHS, telling us how “smooth” the whole move to the hospital was going, I am reading and hearing reports in the local media, and receiving email from readers to this site on a shortage of parking at the new hospital site.
“The new hospital in St. Catharines has only been open a few days and officials are starting to realize they may need more parking,” ran one report this March 27 on St. Catharines’ CKTB radio news.
Now wait a minute again. Didn’t the Niagara Health System – the body created by Ontario’s former Conservative government more than a decade ago to implement an equally smooth amalgamation of hospital services in Niagara – tell citizens across the region way back when that one of the reasons it needed to locate the new hospital out in the western fringes of St. Catharines, on former farmland, rather than somewhere in or around an urban centre was that it needed all of that extra acreage for parking?
And already there isn’t enough parking space? How can that be after the millions of dollars the NHS spent on internal staff and consultants just planning this new hospital site? I may not be a planner, but as a reporter who had a particular issue over the past three decades in covering planning issues and who spent a little time embedded as a communications assistant in Niagara Region’s former planning department, it just seems to me that making sure there are enough parking spaces for people visiting and working at a facility of this nature is something you’d learn about in Planning 101.
The fact that the NHS went out of its way, in the early days of choosing a site for a new hospital, to use the need for enough parking as one of its reasons for picking this site makes this news, that it has somehow found itself well short of parking space already, a little hard to stomach.
One might also ask the NHS’s high-priced planners if it ever occurred to them that if you are going to site a large hospital complex like this away from major transportation, including transit hubs, and so far off from the centre of the region, that more people, including those visiting the site to support a friend or relative receiving treatment there, would need a car to get to the place.
Deb Matthews, the NHS’s interim president, has been quoted saying that steps will now be taken to construct more parking space as soon as the weather improves.
In the meantime, perhaps Matthews and company might use the lack of parking space as an opportunity to encourage the hundreds of NHS staff working at the new hospital site to leave their cars at home and take up carpooling or use public transit to get back and forth from the place.
This could accomplish a few things, including;
- It could free up existing parking space for hospital visitors
- It could, by getting a few more cars off the road, contribute to a cleaner, healthier environment.
- It could help NHS staff appreciate the challenges at least some Niagara residents, who can’t drive their own car, will have getting back and forth from this hospital site.
- And finally, it might set a great model for other larger institutions to encourage carpooling or transit use.
Who knows. There may be a few good things that come out of the NHS’s decision to choose this site for the new mega-hospital for the Niagara region yet.
(Niagara At Large invites anyone who dares to share their first and last name with their comment to share their views on this post. Anonymous comments will not be posted.)
Niagara At Large 
This Taj Mahal is supposed to cater to about 400,000 people it is the only Hospital we have, we don’t have a choice but to go there,and those numb skulls did not provide enough parking, I wish I could laugh about this, I am not amused, these clowns could not run a one horse funeral.
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And this is only the first of many problems that will become public knowledge,,,,there is an old adage that when there is too much poop in the septic it will overflow.
Insisting on relocating Welland and Niagara Falls patients to financially support the new H has caused this conjestion and the Mayors tried to tell the know it all NHS who never listens.
I hope as people become aware of more problems they keep this site informed.
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What a bunch of buffoons!
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Remember how the NHS bragged the mega project was “on time and on budget”…….guess what…….it was neither. Workers are still working; hence the extra 100 cars in the parking lot. And with the additional costs for more parking lot, it will be over budget. I think the NHS deliberately left the parking lot expansion for later, so they can say it was on budget.
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This was ALREADY congested area, even BEFORE the hospital was moved there. I had to move from the area because pollution from car emissions were making me sick. Although I am away from there, I still have problems but nowhere as bad as they were when I lived in that congested end of town. Speaking of which, again I wonder who picked that location and of all things to put there, a hospital! Where sick people go to get well … the dramatic irony of it all. Don’t forget the new overpass we all have to pay for because of its location as well. Geez, wonders never cease, do they?
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A bus only goes to the hospital every half hour in the day and every hour at night. So I really don’t see how this will get anybody out of their cars to use public transit. Perhaps, if public transit in and around the hospital were beefed up, this might improve some of the pressure for parking, but as it is, nobody seems to be moving very fast in either direction.
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Just one screw up after another and for this the CEO’s make the Sunshine List. I guess the secret of success is being born an idiot and maintaining that status for life.
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