BaancBlog

OK. it's really about parking and street cleaning. What else.

However, the new $2.00/hour parking meter fees works out to seven and a half cents per quarter. Reminds one of that song from DamnYankees. That's eight quarters for an hour. By the time you've put in that many quarters, you've used up half an hour.

The current rant comes on a "move your car or we'll ticket it" Tuesday. So he went out to move the car. All of the spaces in the the neighborhood on the non-sweeping side were taken. So he had to park at a meter for a couple of hours across from The Old Dominion Brewhouse. In doing so, he learned a couple of things. He took some pictures. First, here is the 1200 block of Ninth Street, at about 2:30p.


and


Notice the empty parking spaces. A few months ago, when the editor fouled up and had to go to the meters on Tuesday, it was often difficult to get one of those spaces since so many cars were parked there. Not now.

So we've doubled the parking meter fees and probably cut the revenue by a factor of 5 or more. There are certainly block face by block face revenue reports, and it would be interesting to see the before and after numbers on the doubled fees. Those reports might show that for many parts of town, the fee doubling was, if not a major league screwup, at least a AAA league one. It has other effects, as well. Notice the empty spaces in front of Old Dominion (second picture, rad banner). Those use to have lots of customers in them.

Now back to the street sweeping thing. Two pictures:
and .
These were taken before the street sweeper came, with two cigarette butts being pointed out. They were still there at 2:30pm, before which time the street sweeper should have been by.

So the ediitor spent several dollars to park at a meter for receive a city service (clean streets) but the service was not delivered. Not a really big surprise.