The remedy for most of the problems, except the last one, is simply to download the ParkMobile app. Once you've done that, paying for parking involves just a few taps on your phone. For those without smartphones, the kiosks are on the way.
Tiresome as it is for those of us who park on Warren Street to adjust to the new system, consider how it has changed the job of parking officer. In the past, the parking officers could walk up and down the street, on the sidewalk, looking for expired meters. When they saw one, they would issue a ticket. Now their job requires that they scan the license plate of every car parked on the street to find out whether or not the parking fee has been paid. On a holiday weekend like this past one, that's a lot of cars and a lot more work for the parking officers than in the past.
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"The kiosks are on the way..." Hmmm. Let's see: 10 kiosks have been in storage for over a year, but four of them need to be retrofitted to have solar panels that for some reason are missing (Chief Franklin said at the recent SAFETY Committee meeting that she "got a quote" for that work but failed to say what it's going to cost us.) Where will the ten kiosks go, and how many blocks of streets will they cover? Two? If you want to kiosk, say, the 200 block of Warren, you would need at least three on each side -- two in the middle and two at each end. And 6 kiosks may not even be sufficient.
ReplyDeleteLess than a year ago, Jen Belton and Tom Depietro of the Parking Study Committee suddenly realized that if they stuck to their plan to kiosk the entirety of Warren and all the side streets and Columbia, the city would be forced into bankruptcy twice over. So, yes, "the (ten) kiosks are coming." But they won't do much to help matters, will they? It's frightening how shoddily this whole thing was handled. Amateurs, all of them, playing with our money.
The City of Rochester has a combination of parking meters, kiosks and a parking app. On some streets, the only option is to fill a parking meter with quarters. And guess what? They do not charge for parking on the weekends. In Hudson, City Hall and HPD see a busy weekend as an opportunity to make money, particularly by issuing tickets. In Rochester, it's just the opposite. They see free parking on weekends as an opportunity to welcome and attract people to downtown so they need not worry about being ticketed and can instead spend as much time downtown spending their money on something besides a parking app, kiosk or meter or ticket. Like a meal or a gift from a local brick and mortar restaurant or shop.
ReplyDeleteThe City of Hudson, particularly HPD, is addicted to and reliant on ticketing cars, and as a result it can't see the forest for the trees.