I rather ambivalent on this issue, but I can understand the problem.
The City of Escondido, home of PT staffer Pat Restivo, is considering a ban on overnight street parking. Their goal is to reduce the number of families living in houses in the area. Read about it here.
The idea is that if you can’t park your car on the street, and there is no room in the driveway or garage, you will go somewhere else to live. HUH. They say illegal immigrants are flooding homes in some areas living with relatives and if they couldn’t park there, they would move somewhere else.
Let’s see — many families are living in single family dwellings. They are living there illegally. They are in fact in the country illegally. So how do we solve this problem? Simple — we take away their parking space. Oh please.
If you don’t have the political courage to enforce the laws you currently have, I can’t see how making a new one will help.
Now if you decide you want to have cleaner streets, less congestion, a beautiful "Menlo Park" like atmosphere in your community, and you think that not having people park on the streets overnight would do that, then so be it. But don’t blame the problem on illegal immigration.
I think a much better way to solve the problem is to charge for on street parking. Give each house a permit to put one car on the street then charge for all others. Generate money, let people make the economic decision if they want to live where they have to pay to park their cars.
Maybe a lot of driveways and garages will be cleaned out if the occupants realized that the junk in place of their vehicles was costing them a lot of bucks a month. Think of all the yard sales that would crop up to get the places cleared out. Then the cars would be off the street and in the garages. If not, pay or be towed.
Certainly makes better sense in a town like Escondido than a sweeping regulation to clear the streets. Parking is a valuable resource that should be nurtured by cities, not destroyed.
THis is a quality of life issue and the money generated could be used in the neighborhoods for parks, sidewalks, better law enforcement, etc etc etc. Let the people who use the resource pay for it, and pay to protect and preserve it.
JVH
