Car2Go to shutter Toronto operations; service presents different parking issues in Vancouver

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – As Car2Go prepares to withdraw its services from the City of Toronto over parking issues, we’re finding out the company has avoided the same controversy in Vancouver.

Car2Go said Thursday that it had been rendered “inoperable” by a city-run pilot program arriving in Toronto in June that will forbid its use of almost 10,000 parking spaces, where users usually pick up or leave the service’s vehicles.

The carshare business has refused to pay the fees Toronto requested.

“This is not the result we were expecting and to say we are disappointed would be a huge understatement,” Car2Go CEO Paul DeLong said in a letter the company sent users in that city on Thursday.

Car2Go has been in Toronto since early 2012, when it required users to pick up and park cars in designated “Green P” lots. It started allowing them to leave and grab a vehicle from any legal spot on streets in 2016. The company now operates in 26 cities around the world, including Calgary, Montreal and Vancouver.

Vancouver City Councillor George Affleck says carsharing companies do get access to neighbourhood parking here, and they pay for revenue-based parking in the downtown.

However, the freedom that comes with ‘free-floating’ cars, which allows drivers to park in permit-only parking spots, does lead to some criticism.

“We get a lot of complaints, to be honest, of too many cars on the residential streets,” Affleck tells NEWS 1130.

“Some of the areas where we have issues of too many shared-cars parked in the same area are near hospitals, on the edges of the city, and close to SkyTrain stations. But I have found that Car2Go is very quick and the other companies are very quick at getting on it, and they are really required by the city to respect neighbourhoods.”

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