Paul Bass Photo
Keith Myrick stuck a new numeral onto a downtown parking sign to usher in a new meter era.
Myrick, a painter and sign erector for the city’s traffic and parking department, put a “9” on a sign outside the former Scoozi’s restaurant on Chapel Street near York Friday.
He did it as part of a press event to publicize new downtown meter rules. Starting Tuesday May 29, you’ll have to pay to park on the street until 9 p.m. at downtown’s 2,900 meters. (The starting times in the morning will stay the same; those vary depending on where you are.) Currently you can park for free after 7 p.m. The rule applies Mondays through Saturdays. Street parking costs $1.50 an hour.
Myrick’s job has only begun. Entirely new signs have to go up because the words on them — “two-hour limit” — will not apply from 5 to 9 p.m. After 5 p.m., you can pay for four hours of parking. Get ready for more verbiage.
The city originally planned to charge for downtown meters until midnight. Downtown businesses rebelled. So the new plan is a compromise. Downtown businesses and restaurants did want the hours extended until 9 to free up short-term spaces for customers, according to Win Davis (at left in photo), who heads the Town Green Special Services District. Store employees were currently monopolizing those spaces. But the business owners wanted free parking later on as an inducement for people to come downtown at night.
The extended hours will bring an estimated $300,000 to $400,000 in new dough into government coffers, according to Dane White (at right in photo), the city’s deputy director of transportation. But that wasn’t the main impetus driving the new rule, he said; the need to accommodate more visitors was.
Downtown has been changing, White said. It’s time for parking to change along with it.
More signs, for different occasions, were packed up and parked at the press event site.
To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the public interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
Keep voting them in.