The Vancouver Sun has written an article about the the first meter maids in the City of Vancouver. And they were “maids”-all female. One of the nicest people at the City of Vancouver who went on to have a fruitful career in the planning department started as a meter maid. And Branca Verde, who is delightful and a very good judge of character is also persuasive and very good at collaborative problem solving. I am sure those are all skills honed as one of the meter maids hired to check those parking regulations.
Parking meters were installed in the City of Vancouver in 1976, and became a major source of revenue for the City of Vancouver. While the City does not like to say, the monthly return of parking meters can be very lucrative. Think of it-the city is renting by the minute road space the city owns, and other than collecting the coins and regulating the space, it is a very nice cash cow. In fact in 2011 revenues from Vancouver meters were approximately 40 million dollars.
In this article, Branca does reveal a few secrets of checking on parking. Downtown office workers would try to trick them.“People would park all day and re-meter,” Verde said. “The whole intent was to have a turnover for small business and their customers, not for someone to park all day.“We started putting a Smartie on top of the tire under the wheel well. They’d run out and rub out the chalk we’d marked their tire with and think they’d fooled us, but we’d find the Smartie still there.“It was pretty high-tech stuff.”
Today parking officers enforce a lot more bylaws than back then, including anti-idling, leaf cleaning and lawn watering during bans. And there are 9,900 meters today, more than triple the number back then.Today’s average meter rate is $2.23 an hour; in 1976 hourly rates were 10, 20 and 40 cents.Vancouver’s 104 parking officers wrote 377,324 tickets in 2015 (a figure for 1976 is not available).And they no longer appear in court, they record everything digitally.
With driverless technology, metering and enforcement could become a thing of the past. It was people like Branca that pioneered a truly 20th century vocation, and adapted a new use for candy Smarties as one of the tools of the trade.
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
The City has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of for charging for parking – or for making a small mint doing so. They built the streets and maintain them in perpetuity. They in fact built the streets far wider than necessary – and subsequently at greater cost than necessary – just to accommodate cars that just sit there doing nothing.
Parking fees were introduced to incentivize turnover and availability of spaces for all. Imagine if the City just politely asked everyone to ‘please, please only park here for 2 hours at a time because we need to make parking on this street available to everyone’. Right. Now charge $6 for 2 hours and lo and behold that space will be open for the next customer in short order.
The disapproving tones and language that people commonly reserve for municipal parking meters (“cash cow”, “money grab”, ‘city doesn’t like to admit how lucrative meters are’) belie an odd sentiment of civic mistrust. Imagine if the City did not charge for or regulate on-street parking. $40M is small consolation to even partially assuage the endless caterwauling from motorists and business associations over parking. The City should openly boast about how much it rakes in from parking. It means somebody’s doing their job.
(1) They are leaving revenue on the table. Road parking fees are below market . That is why it is hard to find one. (2) CASH GRAB ? That could describe transit user fees . semantics matter. Parking , bridge tolls & transit fares are all user fees which is they should called
Donald Shoup wrote a whole book on this – The High Cost of Free Parking. He has an elegant solution, namely to have variable rates which are dynamically adjusted to leave at least one free spot in every block most of the time. We now have the technology to implement this.solution.
The West End parking plan is trying to address this as well, but city is still caving in to those that want us to subsidize their street parking.
Parking fees are generally far too low given the market values of land in Vancouver. More on this car equivalent of squatting here https://pricetags.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/free-parking-is-like-squatting/
Unclear is why we have so few motorcycle parking stalls ? Why do we not charge by the foot, as some cars are small, and many large ?
Roads should be about moving people or good, be it by car, truck, bus or bike. They should not be about generating money by storing vehicles. Through Easypark the city has plenty of off street venues for that. I would rather see a bike lane down Howe Street than have 2 of the 4 lanes taken up by parked cars.
(1) Street parking removed to improve traffic flow would increase the value of remainder so no loss of revenue if parking fees market driven .(2) Fewer affordable parking options leads to higher transit & carpooling levels.