My comments on motorcycle parking and lost P and D receipts caught a little attention. Read it here:
My comment is no parking is free, no matter how small. If you want to use parking as a vehicle of social change (free parking for motorcycles so more will ride motorcycles and use less gas) so be it. However it seldom works. What works is greed and the free market.
If you want people to buy a hybrid, wait until gas hits $3 a gallon and you will see the sales skyrocket (as is happening now.) If you want to keep cars out of downtown, raise the price of parking so people will think twice about car pooling, or taking the bus, or walking the two blocks from their house to the store.
I think motorcycles should pay less to park, because they take us less space. But that doesn’t mean they should ride for free. Hell, some motorcycles cost more than my car and are so tricked out that with a couple of liner feet of steel they would be a car. They take the space, they should pay for that space.
And, I still say that simply telling motorcycle riders to pay for their parking at the P and D and then take the receipt with them. If they see the parking officer, show him the receipt. If they don’t and get a ticket, send the receipt along with the ticket and if the timing checks out, it will be voided. What’s the big deal? My guess is that only about 10% of the motorcycles will be ticketed anyway. Or, Then there’s Tom DeVito’s solution mentioned at the blog entry. Seems as elegant as any at this point, and pretty cheap. Solves the problem for convertables, too.
JVH
3 Responses
All I can say is “nothing is free”. Even if you have a
motorcycles and it occupies less space in a public parking lot, you’re still going to pay for a certain price. And it’s true that most motorcycles cost too much that it’s even more expensive than a car! Just a thought, maybe if the gasoline will continue to rise from it’s previous price, I think we’ll see less vehicles on the road, we can even save the earth with less consumption of gas 😛
It is not the question of having the ticket voided, it is whether it is fair to have to keep proving that you are being legal by buying time.
If someone takes the sticker, they can take the ticket and really screw with the bikers life. If the ticket is mailed to the person, they would have to keep their receipts for days or weeks to make sure they did not get a ticket.
If they don’t pay, I assume as in many places, that their license will be suspended and they will have to go to court at that point. Not to mention the hassle of having a suspended license.
I just don’t think it is practical to charge motorcycles without having to over-burden the riders to keep proving that they are following the laws.
Plus parking spots can be setup for motorcycles so that you can park 5-6 bikes in the place of one car.
Just in the commuting power of that, I would say that I as a citizen would give them free parking for being part of the reduction of traffic.
Hi John
Our motorcycle parking costs the same as cars for monthly or daily. Our pricing was determined years ago based on pollution. Statistics indicate that motorcycles pollute far worse then any SUV – about 10 times worse