Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

A parallel parking strategy that works

"I like my women like I like my beer: cheap and easy." Forgettable Country & Western song. Cheap and easy has - at least in North American - been raised beyond being simply a lifestyle mantra, raised perhaps to the level of quasi-deity.
58845_l

"I like my women like I like my beer: cheap and easy."

Forgettable Country & Western song.

Cheap and easy has - at least in North American - been raised beyond being simply a lifestyle mantra, raised perhaps to the level of quasi-deity. If it's cheap and easy, we want it, accept it, tolerate it, eat it up... and want more of it. Our appetite for cheap and easy is insatiable.

Sure, there are people who fight selective battles against cheap and easy, even people who trade one off against the other by, for example, baking bread - really cheap but far from easy. Or skinning up Whistler to save the price of a day ticket.

And there are those rare few, generally in the upper snack bracket incomewise, who prefer to pay more rather than less because doing so stokes their self-esteem fires. These are the exceptions that prove the rule though. The rest of us are the rule.

Cheap and easy was given full voice in the recent dust-up over pay parking. Something "free" was being taken away from us. Of course, pay parking isn't free but illusion is often better than reality. If you don't believe me, check out the stats on lottery ticket sales when the jackpot climbs north of 10 million bucks.

During the pleasantly boisterous council meeting two weeks ago, cheap and easy found its most forceful voice not at the microphone open to the outraged public but at a microphone on the staff table. At a meeting where someone had been thoughtful enough to circulate the most recent figures on staff compensation - up 12.8 per cent overall year over year - a general manager who shall remain nameless and whose remuneration runs handsomely to six figures, responded thusly when asked whether it would be possible to impose pay parking on the spots at muni hall staff now freely enjoy. "Yes... but we'd just go park across the street in Lot 4." The quote may not be exact but it closely captures the actual words and exactly captures the peevish tone.

Sure, take our free parking away from right in front of our offices and we'll simply park across the street for free, notwithstanding pulling down 150 grand a year. There, in a nut's shell, is the sense of entitlement that fuelled the anger in the general public. Implementing pay parking is taking something away that we have, if not as a right, then certainly as an entitlement. The people doing the implementing didn't appreciate that when it wasn't their free parking they were taking away. You don't miss your water....

Anyway, the purpose here is not to revisit the outrage around pay parking. It is to offer some constructive suggestions and, hopefully, put the issue to rest, at least within the confines of this page.

First, the conference centre, epicentre of the maelstrom. Lose the machines. If ever a parking lot called out for an attendant, this one does. Here's a short list of why machines suck. They break down. They get vandalized. They get run into by people trying to fit too much vehicle into too little space. They cheat people out of time, at least the way they've been set up so far. They impose arbitrary limits on time. They require a secondary level of enforcement. They invite theft.

Put in a gate and a booth with an attendant. Here are the advantages. You get as close as possible to 100 per cent capture. No one parks without paying to get out. No one has to walk around and chalk tires, write tickets, collect tickets or impound cars of drivers who have ignored tickets in the past. You play, you pay.

It gives people the choice of how they want to use that parking lot. Want to encourage brief parking there? Escalate the charge for longer periods. A buck for the first hour, three bucks for two hours, five for three, a hundred for all day. Capiche? Be out in three.

Lower the rate for evenings when people are parking to eat in restaurants or attend entertainment if you want to encourage that. Let the village merchants validate parking for their patrons if they're concerned about pay parking driving them away... then charge them each month for the privilege based on the number of stamps. Either way, it's still user pay.

And lest you imagine I'm advocating adding yet a few more generously-paid bodies to the muni payroll, contract it out. This, for the gunshy, is a very good place to embrace P3.

While I'm on the subject, you might want to consider gates and attendants for the pay-to-park day skier lots. Same good arguments for; same good arguments against plus the added joy of not having the machines work when they're overcome by the elements. Getting out of the lots at peak time is already a problem. Paying on the way out wouldn't contribute substantially to the bottleneck and might actually smooth it out a bit. The real choke point is the roads, lights and highway, not moving through the lot.

Second, everybody pays to play. If it makes sense to make people coming to the village to patronize businesses pay to park, it makes sense to make people coming to muni hall to do business pay to park. Especially staff! So let's meter the muni hall parking lot, get rid of staff permits - under the library too - and level the playing field. It'll go a long way to quelling the outrage fuelled by the perception of an elite element of society being funded by taxpayers. Suck it up; you're all big boys. Besides, there's always Lot 4.

Third, show me a sign. Any sign. Signage in this town is almost third world when it comes to directing people to parking. We seem to assume people know where to go. They don't. You have to tell people where to go. And we all know how much fun it is to tell people where to go.

Fourth, educate. I was stunned to learn there were underground places to park in this town for as little as $65 a month. If I worked in the village, say at a job where the tips were pretty good and I got off work at 2 a.m. on a snowy, cold night, and I could fetch my car from a warm, dry, underground lot instead of trekking out to Lot 4 where I had to fight for a spot earlier in the day, I'd stop complaining and jump all over it.

I'm sure the rest of you have some good ideas that might not be cheap but are easier than what we've been through. Like so many people said, this ain't rocket science.