Scooter drivers can find free parking around Vancouver with a few helpful hints:
Use the City of Vancouver's
free GIS satellite maps to be sure you're
on private property BEFORE you park!
Most cities have this free
service
to help you avoid the parking gestapo and their tow-trucks! You're safe when parked on private property.
Here's Richmond's GIS Satellite Map
The Parking Ninja app is excited to be live in our tenth city to date - Vancouver! Launching in this beautiful B.C. city nearly completes our West Coast trek where we tagged over 723 spots and nearly 20 businesses.
Vancouver, like its USA neighbours of Seattle & Portland, has done an excellent job of building is beginning to build a motorbike parking infrastructure to make riding, tourism and commuting easier in the city. Vancouver's metered parking, although pricey in many areas, is set up in zones as opposed to individual stalls like Seattle. Each zone has the capacity for as many bikes that can be stuffed in them; typically four to six within a painted box. Each zone has one meter that needs to be paid during meter hours which are 9am-10pm city wide. This creates a unique honour system among parkers where no one person is responsible for paying the meter, but the meter must be paid to avoid violations being issued. While we appreciate the community-building, pay-it-forwardness this creates, it can be (and really is) confusing when determining who is going to make sure the meter is paid up.
There are about as many free parking zones in Vancouver as there are metered ones which are sometimes located just down the street or around the corner from metered spots. However most, as expected, are not in the city center. These free parking zones are found to have both painted and unpainted boundaries, but do have signage denoting where to park. Free parking zones make up roughly half of the city's available spaces with over 350 spots. Besides the confusing meter situation (mostly due to hostile local civic politicians and filthy-rich citizens in giant SUVs that hate motorcycles), Vancouver's city staff have done their best to create parking for motorbikes with high saturation in both the city centre and surrounding areas.
For additional City of Vancouver parking information check these resources: