Spring is here and "PLAY BALL" is heard throughout the nation. The Prez proves he doesn’t throw like a girl, and fans bought six beers during the seventh inning stretch.
At Fenway Park and RFK Stadium in DC, and my guess is at countless ball parks, major, minor and little, across the fruited plain, parking has become a major issue. At Fenway it deals with Handicapped parking and at RFK, parking in the surrounding neighborhoods. (get those permits or you will not be able to park in front of your house).
I, of course, have the solution. Why shouldn’t each homeowner around the ball park charge fans $10 to park in their driveway, or in front of their house. Lets see, most could get three or four cars squeezed in, that’s 30 or 40 bucks for ten minutes work. Heck, let the kids collect,and put it in their college fund. Do that, what 80 times a season, that would be a neat $3200 cash. No one is hurt, locals get a few extra bucks, and the parking problem is completely solved. Most of these stadiums are in central cities where the residents could use a few extra bucks this summer.
If the city looked the other way on business licenses and taxes, everyone would be a winner.
But, my guess is that the local municipalities would come up with some hair brained reason why this idea was dangerous to the future of mankind and they would rather build a $50 million parking garage that would be empty 95% of the time.
Free Market Rules!!!
JVH
2 Responses
NEW USER ENJOY THE GAMES AND REMEMBER PARKING IS NO. 1!!!
In Los Angeles, years ago(don’t know what is happening now)we used to have a situation such as you suggest around the Coliseum. The Coliseum housed upwards of 60,000 attendees and the surrounding parking lots held about 8-9,000 cars. In the surrounding neighborhoods some enterprising home owners(or renters)would charge cars to park in driveways and on front lawns and on parkways etc. The problem was that some neighbors complained and because it was illegal we had to cite the cars on lawns and parkways.
There were also some enterprising youngsters who would charge $20 or so for cars to park in some vacant dirt lots–guess what? That was illegal, too, and of course we had to cite them. On the other hand the number of illegally parked vehicles were so overwhelming sometimes that we didn’t “get to all of them”. The Parking Enforcement Staff in any case took the brunt of all of this and I agree with you that the City needed to look more closely at this and build some parking lots. Who knows maybe since I’ve retired the City has done something constructive about that issue.