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Does your town have pay parking?


bikeman564™

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We have no pay parking.  On a trip to Hartford recently to go to a state office I discovered that they have taken out the parking meters and replaced them with a system of computer kiosks you have to walk to, enter your license plate and deposit your credit card.....or the number to your prepaid parking account.  One presumes that another human job, meter maid or man, has gone away because people are just too expensive.

Don't even get me started about tolls on the highway that arrive by bill in the mail.........complete with an extra fee for the company that mails them.

 

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Our town took them out a few years ago. They found that it was costing more money keeping the meters running and paying 'meter maids' to watch over them than the money they brought in. The mayor tried to get the police to check the meters as an additional duty but the chief of police said that they had more important things to do like eating donuts  catching crooks. So they just got rid of them.

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Grand Rapids, where my office is, has metered parking downtown.  Drop in some coin or scan the OR code with your phone and pay from an account set up with the app.

Kalamazoo has meters in the business areas excluding downtown retail.  There it's 90 minutes free but the spots are very limited.

 

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Baltimore is continually getting worse.  There are some colleges a mile from downtown where evening students attend.  The city decided the put meters at all the free parking spaces on the street.  Absolutely disgusting.  When someone improves a poorer neighborhood with a small shopping and restaurant area, the sob's in the city are waiting to rush right in an put parking meters on the street.

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3 hours ago, bikeman564™ said:

Does your town have pay parking?

My town - Reston - has a mixture of both.  And DC has a ton of meters in the "core" and free spots in less commercial areas.  The Reston Town Center is one of the main restaurant & shopping areas in Reston, and they used the soon-to-open Metro station as a reason to implement paid parking during the day.  It actually started out broader than that, but has been trimmed back a little so it only screws a portion of visitors. It is really just a money grab by the RTC's owner - Boston Properties - and it has hurt their tenants more than it has helped their bottom line. A poor business decision.

I remember when DC was having financial issues in the late 90's and eventually went back under the control of the Federal government. They reduced a ton of services across the board - including cutting some parking enforcement positions.  One GLARING problem with that was that the meter maids cost say $100k/year, but each meter maid wrote maybe $1 million in tickets (and resulted in worse parking conditions).  Cutting the parking enforcement COST the city money.  It was obviously a dopey decision.

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4 hours ago, bikeman564™ said:

I find it completely annoying to have to check in or get towed/ticketed. My area does not have any pay parking :) Last week I drove to one of the upscale burbs and every spot has a meter. I was there almost 3 hours and the meter maxed out at 1 hour ?

One thing does spring to mind - sort of along the lines of the joke about the tunnels between NY city and NJ.  You pay to get into NYC but it is free to go to NJ.

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2 minutes ago, Zackny said:

Ummm no. We do have a traffic light though.

Out town has three traffic lights, after midnight they just blink. We used to have four but an oversized load ripped one out. The traffic flow was so much better with the temporary stop signs they put up that they never replaced the pulled down light.

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Free here everywhere but the airport. They took the meters out of downtown in the 70s hoping to keep business from moving to the mall. 

Now the mall is dying and downtown is enjoying a renaissance. They are trying to keep parking free, but I don’t know if it can last much longer. Downtown is now the place to be for events. I keep wondering when multi level, paid parking will appear. I don’t think it’s that far away. 

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That's Tybee's biggest source of revenue by far.  Most of the spaces are electronic "kiosks", with a few areas with meters.  There is an app available for cell phones where you can get parking time before you get to the island.  Once you have your little printout from a "kiosk", or the app purchase recorded, it's good for anywhere on the island for however much time you purchased.  Tybee residents get a parking decal free of charge each year, but for the public it's up to $175.  I have had people tell me that that is a good deal as they come to the beach a LOT and would have to pay more than that without the decal.

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13 hours ago, Wilbur said:

Yes.  We also have a well enforced 3 hour street parking limit as 

All parking here is free but there is no parking on any street from 2AM to 6AM. You will get a ticket even in front of your own house. 

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