The days of free parking in West Vancouver’s most popular urban park are coming to an end.
Starting Monday, Sept. 15, the District of West Vancouver will charge $5.42 per hour for visitors to use one of the 440 municipal-owned parking stalls near the beach and Centennial Seawalk.
It’s the latest in a list of destination parks council is turning to for parking revenues. Between February 2024 and June 2025, the municipality brought in more than $800,000 from paid parking at Whytecliff, Lighthouse, and Nelson Canyon, Cypress Falls and Seaview Walk parks.
Beyond the waterfront, Ambleside Park contains numerous amenities that draw in users including artificial turf soccer and field hockey fields, full-sized baseball diamonds, pickleball and tennis courts, a skate park, the Keen Lau Fitness Circuit, a par 3 golf course and the West Vancouver SPCA.
Conservatively, district staff estimate the change in Ambleside Park will bring in just under $600,000 per year, although there are 78 parking stalls on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) land in the eastern portions of the park for which the municipality does not have permission to charge for parking.
The base rate will be $3.75 per hour, which will be subject to a 29 per cent TransLink tax and a $.35 convenience fee.
West Vancouver residents and Squamish Nation members are eligible to receive free parking passes through Impark’s website. So far, the district has issued 6,623 such passes – about 15 per cent of the population, staff estimate.
Business community warns of parking woes
Ambleside & Dundarave Business Improvement Association executive director Maureen O’Brien has been lobbying against the change because of the foreseeable impact it will have on local shops.
“If people don’t want to pay five bucks an hour, they’re going to go park in our business area,” O’Brien said.
The commercial streets in the area, including Argyle and Bellevue avenues and Marine Drive, have a mix of time-limited parking stalls that range from 15-minute loading zones to three hours. Demand for street parking far outstrips supply, but the district doesn’t do dedicated enforcement of the time limits, O’Brien said.
“They don’t really keep track of how long people park there. You can go park on Bellevue all day long, and you’re not likely going to get a ticket,” she said. “A couple weeks ago, I was there and a car was parked in a 15-minute zone for six hours.”
O’Brien said the district could generate almost the same amount of revenue simply by having dedicated enforcement of time limits for parking, which would also result in the turnover of parking that local shops and services need for their customers.
O’Brien said a lot of the street parking is being taken up by local employees who commute – something she has been trying to rectify with their employers.
“I try hard to work with our members to say, please ask your staff to just park up a couple of blocks away or in the residential area,” she said.
O’Brien said she isn’t so worried about pay parking keeping visitors from outside West Vancouver away, as people who come to Ambleside Park as a destination tend not to come up to the shops.
But as council looks to expand the areas where visitors will be charged to park, O’Brien said she is adamant that street parking should remain free.
“Ambleside and Dundarave are special and I’m going to fight to try to keep that, and if people have extra money to spend, I’d rather see it go into the businesses than into the parking meter,” she said.
