Where is the Meter Fairy when you need her?
This is a major issue in the Grove and I really think it affects business.This meter maid was ticketing a large Sysco 18-wheeler the other day while the guy was delivering supplies to restaurants. Rather than ask the guy to move, she wrote up her ticket like a thief in the night.
I asked her why and her response was to walk behind my car and start to write me a ticket. Perhaps she didn't speak English, which may have been the case.
If I was a visitor to the Grove, I don't think I would return after that. Of course if I was a visitor to the Grove, I would not be opening my big mouth and asking why she was giving tickets, but I just found it to be a nasty thing to do. She knew he had nowhere to park and he was just trying to get the items delivered.
The Sysco guy for once, was parked on the side of the road and not in the center of everything, where ironically, they don't hassle him. When he and others are literally blocking lanes of traffic, they are not ticketed, when they are parked on the side of the road, I guess they expect them to put money in the meter or they are ticketed.
This same meter maid started ticketing cars of people picking up work from various artists during the Mad Hatter Arts Festival. I saw this myself. They would bring their car to the artits's tent and start to lug the big piece of art into the car and this meter girl was right on their tail telling them to move or be ticketed.
Then business owners want to know why people don't return to Grove events or come to their places of business anymore.
The arrogance of the meter readers sends out bad vibes and doesn't belong in Coconut Grove. In so many parts of the state, parking is free. When is that going to catch on here? I know there is talk about free 2-hour parking for the holidays. Hope that happens. Last year merchants would validate receipts for free 2-hour parking.
posted by Tom Falco at 4:00 PM
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21 Comments:
The MeterMaid has nothing to do with the problem. The rules are the problem. Directing your rants to her is worthless. If you'd like to change something, aim at the rulebook she reads.
The sysco guy should pass on the tix cost to the biz they're delivering to.
The little parkind there is needs to be distributed and meters is the know method world wide. Time limits could work, but now days the city will fight tooth and nail against losing that revenue stream.
Revenue from the meters is probably negligible, and revenue from the tickets is incidental.
I believe that, in most commercial areas, meters actually were installed at the REQUEST of business owners, so that local residents and emplyees would not be allowed to hog potential customer parking spots all day long.
As a local merchant I know for a fact that most merchants want the meters gone.
we should ditch the meters, and convert the [parking to 2 hour limits. To ensure people do not permanently park you can have the ticket officers either mark the tires with chalk like they do in NY in most other normal places in America. The meters suck. The machines never work and they steal money and it makes parking a nightmare. While were at it, mayfair has a garage and parking on the back street. All those no parking spots on grand should be converted to open spaces.
It would also help if the converted those spaces on grand, virgina, etc to angled spots. You could probably double the number of spaces.
The trucks in the middle of the street are a real problem. Not only do they block traffic, they block visibility big time and it's just a matter of time before someone steps from behind a truck and gets run over.
I think they should be ticketed. Oddly enough, as you pointed out, they are not... they are ticketed when they park correctly.
The problem is not the rules (I am sure it is illegal to park in the middle of the street)... the problem is the sheer stupidify of some of our paid officials who can't seem to use some common sense.
Write letters to the mayor.
I've thought about this problem backwards and forwards for the eleven years that I've lived in the Grove, and always come to the same conclusion: that the parking situation in the Center Grove is the result of a failure of urban planning. There are simply not enough resources for accessing the central shopping areas (i.e., parking, public transit, bikeways, etc.) in relation to the volume of businesses that seek customers.
That is why I sometimes take the heretical position that the best thing for the Center Grove would be to allow more dual-use development, and/or to encourage more office space to locate nearby.
I think a little common sense could have been used by the meter maid......unfortunately her attitude is typical of most city employees. SEEMS TO BE A REQUIREMENT OF CITY EMPLOYMENT....NO EDUCATION BEYOND 3RD GRADE !
The driver will only give this and anyother tickets he received in Miami to his dispatch manager and they will either pay or fight them all in court and settle on a lum sum fee. So donot worry about the poor commercial vehicle parking problem. I use to be in the bus in Manhattan and this is just the cost of doing business in the big city. Also marking tires is another waste of time. Local merchants will just go out and remove the markings on their tires every two hours. True this is a Village not a city shopping area so it should be parking friendly for all. Maybe Eco friendly cars should park for free? Any thoughts?
Ok, at the MIAMI PARKING AUTHORITY you can find the "Fiscal Year 2007"
There you'll see:
total in 18.6 Million
total out 13 Million
of the 18.6M that come in,
On-Street parking is 8.4M
there you can find more info on maintenance etc., but those are the rough numbers.
Now tell me again this is negligible...
https://www.miamiparking.com/mcv2.asp?sd=20080421150210
You have to be a miserable person to make other people miserable by giving out parking tickets all day; there must be something else you could do. And what about those cabs that take up spaces on Virginia St. near bookstore and then othe cabs come along and doublepark so they can gab. Those cabs belong over by the Ritz/Sonesta/Doubletree and not taking up valuable space for residents and businesses. Put them over on Florda Ave.
I liked it when if you bought meter time for 15 minutes and left your slip on your dashboard you to another hour free. But now they have confused it more with parking by phone..... and that is just for people with text messaging.
Telling you how it's negligible -
(1)On-street parking is 45% of the gross.
(2)If net is $5.6M, then on-street parking accounts for $2.5M income.
(3) City budget is $480M.
(4) On-street parking income is therefore one-half of one percent of City budget.
(5) Grove probably accounts for 5% or less of that, or 0.025% of City budget - i.e. "negligible"
Anon 8:32,
Forget comparing apples and oranges, your logic is apples to orangutans. Why not compare parking income to the gross domestic product of the United States? Now we're talking negligible.
Nice breakdown on the numbers.
Grapevine, it seems that you feel that the Sysco truckdriver should not have been ticketed because he had nowhere else to park.
When you and I are working with our ordinary cars and running around town, we can't just park anywhere we want to.
Based on your theory, we should be even more exempt from ticketing because our cars take up much less space.
Tony,
I don't think Grapevine is saying that the delivery drivers should not have to pay while the rest of us do. Parking in general needs to be fixed. The problem is that the inconvenience of parking pushes people away from using the Grove as a retail area. We live in the North Grove, and I know that a good percentage of the time when we want to pick up something quickly at a shop, or do takeout from a restaurant, we simply go somewhere else because of the limited parking and the overly aggressive meter maids. Sure, you can park at Cocowalk and pay $8, or park further away behind Mayfair, but when you simply want to pick something up quickly, that just doesn't work and we'll go elsewhere.
I understand the city revenue angle, but I wonder how much money retailers lose so that the city can increase revenue slightly.
If the city truly cared about illegal parking (and earning revenue) they might actually ticket the massive number of cars parking ON THE SIDEWALKS and on the clearly marked "no parking" swales through out the Center Grove area.
This is a problem the city has created by allowing developers to build 2 large single family townhouse's with essentially ZERO parking to be built on a lot where a single home once stood, DOUBLING the density essentially with ZERO parking.
People have to walk out into the street, into traffic, women pushing baby strollers etc to get around.
E-mails and phone calls(to the parking authority, mayors office etc) and even asking the various law enforcement around to ticket has proven useless.
Anon 10:17 - I notice you don't offer any "logic" in response; just personal insults.
The numbers speak for themselves, and I guess you just have a superior understanding of the word "negligible".
Anon 5:51,
Sorry that the logic and vocabulary was over your head.
Today Tues. at noon there were FIVE (5) cabs PARKED on one block on Virginia St.taking up most of the spaces for residents and tourists. And I am sure they weren't feeding the meter. My plan was to go to the bookstore and run over to Cocowalk but there was no parking for a short visit so I left. When the Mayfair was under construction they parked on Fla. Ave. - why can't they do that again? SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE ABOUT THIS. Keep one at the Mayfair and send the others to the Ritz.
No, the poor cab drivers need to make a living, blah, blah, and on, and on.
Parking is for parking, not cabbies waiting for fares. Could you ever imagine parking in a taxi zone??!!
I think that the idealist in all of us (including myself) envisions that these annoyances eventually will be eliminated. But they won't.
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