The curb is the most contested square metre in the city
Parking, patios, bike lanes, buses, loading zones: every fight is the same fight. Council finally had it honestly.
Council spent two hours this week on eleven blocks of curbside parking, and the temptation is to file that under municipal tedium. Resist it. The curb argument is the whole city argument, conducted six metres at a time.
Every claim on a downtown street is reasonable on its own. The driver wants ten minutes near the door. The restaurant wants its patio and its 11 a.m. delivery. The resident wants the permit spot her taxes imply. The bus wants a clear lane, because it is carrying more people than the forty parked cars beside it. The curb cannot honour all of these at once, and for decades the city's answer has been to pretend otherwise and let the parking enforcement office adjudicate the contradiction.
Pricing the curb is not a war on anyone. It is the city admitting the space is scarce and valuable — which everyone fighting over it already believes, or they would not be fighting.
The pilot will produce a number every previous debate has lacked: what a block of curb is actually worth, in dollars, by hour. We would like the same honesty applied to the rest of the right-of-way, and we suspect the residents of the eleven blocks — circling less, walking a little more — will get there first.
