Whitehorse drivers will need to dig out an extra loonie to feed parking meters downtown, as the city gets ready to double meter fees in the core.

By mid-summer, parking-meter rates in downtown Whitehorse will go from $1 to $2 for a two-hour period. Motorists can still pay 10 cents for 12 minutes of parking time.

The city currently makes more than $250,000 from parking metres each year. Raising the rates could double that income, but bylaw chief John Taylor said the price hike is aimed more at keeping traffic flowing in the downtown core - and perhaps even encouraging people to consider other forms of transportation.

"Maybe we should be raising our rates so people will use our public transit, so people will become more conscious of it and not [have] one person to a vehicle all the time. So that's part and parcel of it," Taylor told CBC News on Thursday.

Motorists surveyed by CBC News had mixed feelings about the city's strategy, with some arguing that hiking parking rates downtown will drive people farther away from the city's core.

Others suggested that Whitehorse's parking fees are a relatively good deal compared to rates in cities in southern Canada.

The City of Whitehorse has budgeted $146,000 to buy new parking meters that will take toonies. After all, motorists would appreciate meters that work, Taylor noted.

"We get people saying, 'This meter doesn't work, that meter doesn't work.' Hopefully this is going to eliminate some of the problems that we're having with some of our older mechanisms because the coins aren't working right," he said.

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