Two hours on curbside parking, and council finally says what downtown is for
The pilot prices a parking spot at what the space is worth. The debate priced everything else.
Council spent two hours Tuesday on a one-year curbside pricing pilot covering eleven blocks, and by the end had said more about what downtown is for than any strategy document has managed in a decade.
The pilot is simple enough: sensors on the meters, prices that drift up when a block is full and down when it empties, capped at double the current rate. The administration's case ran on one number — a third of downtown traffic at peak is people circling for a spot that does not exist at the posted price.
The objections were not about parking. They were about who the curb belongs to: the driver stopping for ten minutes, the restaurant that needs the loading zone, the resident paying for a permit, or the bus that could move forty people through the same six metres. "We are not arguing about meters," one councillor said, to the only laugh of the afternoon. "We are arguing about the most contested square metre in the city."
The vote went 9–4. The sensors go in after the September long weekend, and the first price report comes back to committee in the new year — with, the motion specifies, the circling number counted again.
