Josef K. Parks a Car

Warning: long, long rant ahead…

The time has come to pack up some boxes and start nudging the orbit back towards southern California. But if you have a few large boxes you want to stash somewhere in the city, you need a means of transporting them. Montreal really is a fantastically good city when it comes to getting around without a car, but transporting heavy stuff is a problem not easily solved by rental bikes or the metro.

Enter the van rental. Naturally, one reserves a var or van rental online. There’s a rental office just a short ways from us, but since we wanted a van, we couldn’t get it at the easy local office because their office’s parking garage’s ceiling is too low. Or so they assert. People park SUVs in there. It makes no logical sense. But sensible or not, we had to go to a distant rental office to pick up the van. Fortunately, the office is just near a metro stop of the Green line. Hooray!

Except when we got there and finally found the rental office in the mall, it was all locked up. A robotic kiosk offered to scan copies of the documents we had already submitted (and theoretically offer us a key if we did?) — but we hadn’t printed the documents before setting out. Connecting via their two-way phone system to an actual human being, we were informed that this facility didn’t have the vehicle anyway, and we’d have to go to a different one… half way across town. One metro ride, a transfer, and a mile walk got us to the facility. We got the documents emailed to us, signed them twice (since the signing page has a bug that lost all the interactions on our first try), downloaded their damage-documenting app, and finally got on the road.

I won’t bore you with construction or traffic woes; suffice to say we were able to eventually get back to the Village. But we couldn’t park. There were no spaces. Eventually, we parked a few blocks away at the $8 two-hour street parking, walked back, took all the boxes down three flights of stairs. Then Manon went and fetched the van, we loaded it up, and drove uneventfully over to the storage place where we unloaded.

Now, if things ended here, this would be a relatively uneventful little story. The problem was that we needed to use the van again the next day for a different drop-off, so we need to keep it overnight. We drove around our neighborhood, in ever-widening circles, looking for a place to park.

There are web pages that help one find a place to park. We tried SpotAngels, which had us download our second app of the day. But they don’t really give much real-time information on what’s out there. They can show where parking is allowed and where it’s free, but there’s not data about where it’s all parked up. The map made it look very promising!

But few of those spaces are actually vacant! We had already tried that $18 parking spot in the image (at the nearby Place Dupuis), and the attendant told us we couldn’t (and recommend a place all the way across town).

So we circled …

… and we circled…

… and circled …

… and circled …

… and circled …

Finally, we went back to the $8 for two hour spot to gain us time to do some research. The pay street parking in Montreal is marked by small bollards with a number and hours. You then have to hunt up a pay console to get your parking pass.

The kiosk will, if you’re lucky, accept your credit card. If you’re unlucky, it might just restart the process when it comes time to read your card. Then you have to once again enter your spot number, punch the time button until it’s a reasonable amount of time, select your payment type, and hope it doesn’t make you repeat the process yet again.

Our neighborhood has numerous parking lots visible when driving around or on maps. Sadly, many are private or restricted. While trying to recover from our last search, I looked on Apple Maps, and saw a nearby parking lot. Clicking on it linked me to IndigoNeo, a parking management app. Parking lots partner with them to offer on-demand or monthly parking payment systems. So to use their service, I downloaded the third app of the day.

There were lots and lots of lots nearby. Clicking on the spot I’d seen in Apple Maps yielded the message “booking not available online,” but it wasn’t clear to me what that meant. Did that mean I couldn’t reserve a space? Only on-site payment was accepted? The facility was not available to the general public? We investigated, to find (at least in this case) it was that last explanation.

There were roll-up doors, but the sensor to open sesame apparently required some special magnetic card.

Near despair, we went to a different less-nearby facility that didn’t have that popup message. It had similar doors, but when we pulled up, they miraculously opened! A machine with a turnpike provided us a parking receipt for the “Ilot Voyageur” lot, and we found a place. Success!

As we approached the stairs to exit, however, we came upon a sign. It was concerning, because we didn’t know whether we were restricted to a specific place within this enormous subterranean structure. Particularly ominous were the instructions about P1 and P2, designations we had not seen anywhere.

We searched around, but being weary, and not seeing any references to P1, P2, or Panything, we decided this was ok.

Then it was just a matter of getting back out of the structure. This involved walking …

… and multiple red doors …

… and stairs …

… and more stairs …

… and a hallway. A sign there made us think that perhaps the warning sign below was a reference to getting back into the structure to recover our car, not a demarkation of which areas were parkable. We continued …

… through another hallway …

… and finally out onto the street. Where, turning around, we finally found something that let us know we’d parked in P1 or P2. Hallelujah! From here, all that remained was the walk home. And the retrieval of the van the next day.

With great trepidation, we scanned our parking card, and the portal opened. We reversed these steps, descended into the gray and silent land below, where we found the van had not been towed.

Using the NeoIndigio app, we scanned the parking ticket. It displayed a message reading “Success!”

One hurdle remained. We had to get through the turnpike.

Eating no pomegranate seeds and not looking behind us, we rolled up to the automat. We scanned the ticket again, and lo! The turnpike raised.

We were free!

Thus we made it to another day of box transport. We returned the van, and returned to our simple, blessed life of carless existence.