Banff council has parked the idea of a reservation system for vehicles in a bid to try to control the number of day-trippers entering the tourist town.
While the Town of Banff has the legal authority to implement a parking reservation system, municipal officials say they have no authority to restrict people from entering the community or to close roads unless it is an imminent emergency.
“If someone is coming off the highway to go to Tim Hortons or to go to the gas station or just wants to drive around town, we can’t stop them. We do not have the authority to restrict access to the municipality,” said Stephen Allan, engineering coordinator for the Town of Banff.
“If you’ve got a situation where you’ve sold 100 per cent of reservations, and you’ve still got vehicles coming from elsewhere into our community and they’re driving around looking for parking, then there’s none because it’s all reserved, so we’ve actually created more congestion rather than less.”
Last December, Banff council tasked administration with investigating the feasibility of a parking reservation system during peak summer months, which would essentially amount to a cap on private vehicles visiting the townsite.
With increasing visitation to more than four million visitors a year throughout Banff National Park, particularly day-trippers from Calgary and the region during the summertime, the tourist town has grappled with parking and traffic congestion in its boundary of four square kilometres.
Over the September Labour Day long weekend, the townsite set a one-day traffic record for 2024 with a total of 32,500 vehicles on Sept. 1. Main entrance vehicle volumes from Friday to Monday were 118,629, up nine per cent from 2023 and up 10 per cent from the pre-pandemic year of 2019 – a record year.
In recent years, so-called over-tourism has taken a toll on residents, with the 2023 community social assessment citing pressures from increasing visitation as one of the threats residents see to community well-being.
Coun. Chip Olver, who was a strong supporter of looking at a parking reservation system to deal with increasing day visitation and the impacts on residents, said she wished the Town of Banff had more authority to deal with this.
“It seems that some of the potential solutions to our congestion problem are not within our authority or they might not be within our authority, but the method is not going to be effective or it’s questionable and impractical,” she said.
“That’s disappointing.”
One of the biggest problem areas is vehicles crossing the Bow River Bridge to travel on Mountain Avenue to tourist attractions on the south side, including the gondola and hot springs on Sulphur Mountain, where drivers simply turn back around when there is no parking at the free parking lots.
On the busiest of summer days, traffic is backed up for hours.
A report to council described the legal authorities with respect to road closures.
A permanent closure requires a bylaw, with a public hearing and approval from the provincial minister for transportation.
If amendments to the streets roads and lanes lease is required, this would also require Parks Canada’s consent. The Town also has limited authority with respect to temporary closures.
Allan said the trigger for a road closure is an “imminent hazard to public safety.”
He said Parks Canada has closed the Mount Norquay Road entrance on the few occasions when vehicles back up along the Trans-Canada Highway, noting traffic is then temporarily diverted to Compound Road or Banff Avenue into town.
“It’s not that the road network is congested and we’d like to close town,” he said. “It’s back-up on the highway and there’s other stationary vehicles and there’s other vehicles travelling at potentially 90 km/h or faster and that is a very, very unsafe situation.”
Coun. Hugh Pettigrew questioned whether a certain number of vehicles in the townsite could constitute an emergency and allow for a road closure.
“What I am hearing today is there’s a limit to our capacity of road, whether it’s 30,000, 40,000 or 100,000,” he said.
“Would that be considered an emergency at a certain threshold, therefore triggering a road closure?"
Town Manager Kelly Gibson said that is not the case.
“It’s not a decision of we’re not at a comfortable point right now so this is an emergency. We don’t have flexibility in saying, ‘well, it’s an emergency if I can’t get to my house in 35 minutes’. That’s not considered an emergency situation,” he said.
“Where it would be an emergency is if there was a significant vehicle crash on that road and we didn’t want backed-up traffic and there was no access they could re-route to another entrance, but it’s not we can shut down the town.”
While the municipality does have legal power to implement a parking reservation system, Allan said it would be fraught with challenges regardless.
Some of the challenges, he said, include visual impacts of various gate and detection systems, a degraded experience for visitors who weren’t aware of the system before arriving in town, or residents and visitors ‘timing out’ of their reservations.
Allan said any reservation system involving a significant number of stalls – at a scale where it might have a meaningful effect on congestion – would also negatively impact Banff residents with the three hours per day of free parking.
“One of the tricky things is we’ve given residents three hours of free parking per day … if you implement a parking reservation system, then you have to try and work out how to accommodate those three hours free,” he said.
“If you’re talking about a system that had every single parking stall, how do you actually define those stalls that are available for residents coming down to run a quick errand? So that would be one of the complexities that would have to be figured out.”
Mayor Corrie DiManno said it was helpful to learn what the Town of Banff can and cannot do.
“It just gives us a lot of clarity to some of those suggestions we hear in the community,” she said.
“It really makes us focus in on what is in our jurisdiction and gives us more direction on how we’d be engaging with Parks Canada, in particular in how to help in managing our traffic congestion because a lot of it is outside of our control.”
Parks Canada uses a parking booking system in Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula National Park. Time slot reservations allow travellers to plan in advance, and once the parking is fully booked, there is no other access at that time to the popular destination located in the Niagara escarpment.
In the United States, California’s Yosemite National Park has piloted a new vehicle reservation system this year, which runs for select dates during busy times from April through October, and Utah’s Zion National Park is looking at a vehicle reservation system to manage crowds.
Coun. Grant Canning said his experience in U.S. national parks is reservation systems are primarily used for scenic byways, similar to what Parks Canada does at Moraine Lake where private vehicles are banned and access is only via private shuttles or public transportation.
“Most of the service centres in U.S. national parks are located outside the park, not inside the park like Banff is,” he said.
