Park Here: 9 Serious Ideas for Downtown Parking

Laini Abraham has generated a useful discussion on her Facebook page about parking in downtown Easton. Seems like a lot of people are unhappy with getting tickets and a lot of others are abusing the meters. Lets look at (and invite) some creative solutions:

1. Park a couple of blocks outside the inner perimeter of downtown stores and consider the walk your daily exercise instead of a chore or the failure to get a good space.
2. Park at the perimeter of a mall or supermarket lot and think of it as your daily exercise and a way to save your car from dings and dents.
3. Suspend parking meter fees between, say, noon and 1:30 pm to encourage people to eat lunch (or shop on their lunch hour) downtown.
4. Set aside one parking space on each block in Easton’s downtown inner perimeter to auction to the highest bidder (monthly silent auction?). Split the proceeds between ProJeCt of Easton, the Third Street Alliance, and Safe Harbor. Winners own that space for the month between 9 am and 5 pm.
5. Continue to give out parking tickets for overstaying meter time, but put a checklist on the ticket of appropriate City departments (schools, recreation, police, public works, environmental safety, etc.) so that ticket payers can direct their penalty/fine to a public sector they wish to support. Offer them an opportunity voluntarily to double their fine for the public good.
6. Take away the business license of any owner of a downtown business who feeds the meter for his or her own car—thus preventing real customers from using that space. (This was the non-serious, but well-meant, idea.)
7. Put all parking tickets in a pool and draw a winner once a month—the winner to be awarded two tickets to something (a beer at Porters? a cone at the Purple Cow? Carmelcorn? A free car wash?) Take a major sting out of a minor annoyance. (Hey, give donors an ad on the ticket!)
8. Ask Wal-Mart, where you can rarely find a space within sight of the entrance, to install parking meters for the closest 50 or 100 parking spaces—the money collected to go to the Easton Arts community, or the food bank.
9. Each month, give a free downtown parking meter pass (dated, of course) to the person who presents to the parking authority receipts for the highest total spent in downtown businesses the previous month. (You can only win once in a 12 month period.)
10. Have voter registration forms at the pay for your ticket window to encourage ticket holders to vote in the next election.