You Say Gaming, I Say All’s Fair In Parking
Smart parking meters popping up in various Northern Cali cities are making it harder to “game” the system, reports the Chron.
Sensors can detect when a car pulls out of a spot and reset it to zero so the next parker doesn’t benefit from his brother’s dime. Which is frankly, kind of crap. Left-over parking meter time is one of the last, easiest ways of doing something good for your fellow driver. Sure, it’s unintentional, but it’s nice, right? That extra dime you put in - (ha! Dime! In SF! What’s that now, like 43 seconds?) helps the person after you because it’s all of us against DPT, right? One for all and all against the meter maid?
That money is for the next driver, NOT the city! Leave it there, it’s rightfully purchased time and should remain.
Or how about GPS enabled parking officers’ vehicles that can remind them that you’ve been in that time-restricted spot too long, even if there’s no meter? Seems like the deck will be stacked against us in no time. As it is in San Francisco, downtown meters require so much change drivers nearly have to take Bart or Muni just to access the change machines to feed the meter anyway. TWO minutes per five cents? Seriously? And we’re a city of renters - you damn well know our quarters go to laundry.
For some of these parking enforcement trends, the policy reasoning is, well, reasonable. But for others . . . . With my background in state government, I’m usually fine with state and local government doing what it can to enforce the laws and keep revenues up. But The Great Parking Game seems like the one arena in which Joe Public and Jane Law Enforcement can interact and cat-and-mouse each other with more creativity and less danger. Changing all the rules makes parking a lot less fun and a lot more costly, doesn’t it?
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The problem with cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and others is that legally, they don’t charge you, or I, the meter user for “parking” as a service with a value on it. Rather, they issue tickets for “expired meters.”
That is a significant legal difference. That’s why, for example, in Seattle, even after it was proven that meters routinely CHEATED people out of the time they thought they had, they had no legal recourse against the city of Seattle. The courts said simply that the law is about expired meters ,not about selling of space.
SF talks a good game about the environment and mass transit, and honest government when the UN is in town. Let’s see them put the petal to the metal, and do something real. Charge market rates for parking on the street. Make mass transit work, instead of a half-assed joke. Give people a good reason to ditch the car - instead of just punishing them with fees and taxes and fines in the hopes the “inconvenience” will “encourage” them to change their ways.