Will they ever learn?

Calgary has a lot to learn about how parking affects peoples' decisions to go downtown to do business. Not long ago they introduced some pretty lame measures to soak parkers for more money or outright drive potential customers away from the downtown core.

A typical meter allows for a maximum of 2 hours of parking, but recently some meters were changed to only allow 1 hour at most. One recent Saturday morning Darlene and I wanted to try a downtown restaurant for breakfast, but every meter in the area had been converted to one hour maximum. How are we supposed to walk to the place, order, eat our meal and return in an hour? Luckily, a nearby underground parkade (at Banker's Hall) offers flat fee $2 parking (10am to 6pm). The City made the meter change to make more short-term parking available for people who had to make quick stops downtown, but I'm certain the weekends are a good time to revert to longer stays at metered spots, with demand reduced.

Yeah, yeah, I could take public transit downtown and not have to worry about parking, but in that case I'd have to pack a breakfast and maybe consider eating dinner downtown instead - for all the time it would take. OK, maybe I'm stretching a little.

Another trick they've tried is that there are meters that insist on a minimum (unannounced) amount deposited before registering time on the meter. In one case, the meter allowed two hours of parking at a rate of something like $2 per hour, but even though the meter accepted anything bigger than a quarter, you had to pump $4 into the meter before it registered any time - in this case, the full 2 hours. Way more than I was willing to stay - or pay.

BAD MONKEYS!