“Nancy, parking at the new studio is very hard…”

Yes, we have heard your concerns and Julia and I had a looooong meeting yesterday about Sunberry’s current parking issue and possible solutions.

Why did we choose a location with parking this bad?

Earlier this year when we were looking for a new location there were many characteristics about the Beckwith studio that we thought would be great for the Sunberry community.

• Close to Bridgeport Station
  • this would cut down on the likelihood that instructors would be late coming by Skytrain
  • Increasing the convenience for customers commuting by transit
• Newer studio
  • Our Hazelbridge studio was build in 1989… it’s well very hard to make it feel new/look new no matter how hard we tried

Before deciding on the Beckwith studio, we also weighted it against the downsides:

• Parking
  • Earlier this year Julia and I spent about 2 weeks time observing traffic and the parking situation around the studio. We specifically focused on Costco’s customer flow. We figured this would be the biggest source of “parking competition”. Based on our observation at the time, their peak hours will just miss most of our store hours
• Studio spaces
  • We did realize that the absolute floor space on the dance floor would be about 100 square feet smaller, but the better shape would give us roughly the same spots

We Missed the Real Cause of Bad Parking…

After observing for more than 2 months we have realized that Costco traffic is not the main cause of our current parking situation, but it’s actually from Skytrain parking. This is something we failed to observe until a few weeks ago.

What made the Beckwith location favorable is also what is making “not as favorable”.

We started noticing that Skytrain parking about 3 to 4 weeks ago when Julia arrived super early on a Saturday morning – long before any of the other stores in our plaza or nearby was open, long before Costco was open. She looked around and all of the street parking was taken, so were some of Costco’s.

The only thing around us that was open that early had to be the Skytrain.

After that Saturday morning, we arrived early during the weekdays to see if this was true during the week. Everyday without fail by the time it was 8, 8:30 am, all of the street parking would be full, and it would stay that way until around 6 or 7pm, when it was after work.

Now What?

Obviously sneaking into other people’s parking is not the long term solution…. And there are only so many days in a month that you would so happen to want to shop at Costco.

1. Time Limit Street Parking

We started sharing our findings with the other business owners in the plaza, and we all can agree that having Beckwith Rd street parking for the plaza customers is beneficial for all of the customers.

Over the next few months, we start the process of proposing to the city to see if they can change the street parking on Beckwith to 3 hours. This has happened on many of the other street around our area as more businesses opens and residential development are completed.

2. Find Temporary Parking

Meanwhile we will be asking around finding temporary parking for Sunberry customers. These might be at different places during different times, but we will do our best.

Feel free to leave us comments or email us about any ideas and suggestions you have!

• Nancy