Paid Parking Pilot Post-mortem
It cost about $47,000 and brought in at least $100,000, maybe more if tourist fines get paid, some 2% of the letters received praised it, 42% wrote in protest, 13% hated it enough to vow never to return, and the options on the table now include $300,000 to replace summer student jobs with robots, expanding the blight to 2nd Ave and a concession to only tax residents a little bit less than our visitors.
Yes, it was the Paid Parking Public Meeting, and no, I wasn't there, I had a very important Oliphant Market to attend, but as we drove by and saw the half-full parking lot at the Amabel-Sauble, I had hoped someone would be kind enough (or riled enough) to post the real story here on the SBP; instead, all we have are some minutes so scant as to be seconds, a bullet list of if's and's and a few but's. Some highlights:
- Residents only go to beach for one hour per day,
should have resident pass- Already pay sufficient taxes, should have pass
- two churches on Lakeshore Blvd. N. congregation issued passes for Sunday mornings
- By-Law Enforcement wants to see paid parking from 9am-8pm
- No signs, no signs, no signs, misleading, can't find, couldn't find, shouldn't be required to find ...
- Beach will become cheap and commercial
- Include Second Ave, lanes and streets between Lakeshore and
Second Ave, Municipal parking lots in this area ...- 26 ticket spitters required - approximately $300,000 including taxes, purchased on three year repayment program, ten year life expectancy
[ via South Bruce Peninsula Crier: 2005 Paid Parking Pilot Project Summary ]
Conspicuously absent: Any mention of follow-up, of where any follow-up might get posted, or when, or who might be choosing between the Lesser of the Three Forward Evils ...
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Sammy Seagull finds a good home
You know what really depresses me the most about this post-mortem pointless point-list? You know what gets me right here reading this? I'll tell you what gets me.
Is this what we have become?
In all those points, every last one of them, every last small little whiny bullet in the list down to the very last bottom of the line of them, it is all, unanimously, I, Me, Mine, all of it, Looking out for Number One. Sure I applaud passes to ratepayers, since they have paid the tax already since time began, but isn't it the ratepayers demanding it? And I applaud the churches for easing the congregation's cost (it didn't say, but the Churches did pay their share, right?) since I suppose that bulk-bought parking money came from congregation money anyway! And I do applaud all the youngsters who sat there in the blazing heat getting far more tan than they'd bargained for, only to have their own employer decide it would be oh so much more efficient to put them all out of work and save some more pennies ... and on it goes.
look at that list and someone please explain to me why there cannot be even the least smallest hint of a shred of even just one of my list of positive options for beach parking.
Not a one.
IMHO, humble and disenfranchised tho it may be, this is the root of the why of the where of all the who done whats that go into the fiasco of modern government: Lacking any common mandate theme and stated evaluation purpose of "How does this make life better for everyone?" we cast John Nash's cooperative equalibrium theorem to the wind and grab gimme gimme gimme until we've rent the very thing we wanted to have.
A seagull is indeed a fitting totem.