It may just be the vagaries of the way Yahoo sorts its findings, but over the past six months or so I have seen more stories about parking in Mountain Village, CO, than any other single city, including Denver, LA, Chicago, New York or San Francisco. For those ski challenged readers, this is actually Telluride, the famous ski resort.
The local rag, the Telluride Daily Planet, who by the way requires that you pay to read its articles on the ‘net, reports that the local council is embroiled in a fight with just about everyone in its desire to start charging for parking. Since I only have read the first paragraph of each article (I’m too cheap to pay to read the rest) I can only surmise but it seems that there is an entity called Telski (Telluride Ski and Golf) which had years ago cut a deal to allow its customers free parking. Well, since visitors are usually customers of Telski, this could cause some problems.
The “Daily Planet” (sigh) reports almost daily breathless articles about the controversy, both the council meetings and reaction from locals. I don’t know the details but it seems to me that folks who pay upwards of $100 a day for lift tickets can afford to pay for their parking. The problem is, as usual, that the locals are the ones that will be stuck with the bill.
If anyone knows about the ins and outs of parking at Telluride, fill me in.
Oh, if they need help in dealing with their parking, they should go down the road to Vail, where arguably the most user friendly parking system on the planet exists, and has for years. I wrote about it in the first or second year of PT’s existence and was impressed with the fact that the goal was to give residents and visitors every possible way to pay for their parking including meters, permits, in car meters, debit cards and the like. And remember this was a decade ago.
JVH
