Saturday, August 30, 2014

A random thought on limited parking

What's the key to relaxation, to letting yourself have the time to explore a new place or have a new experience? Time. It's letting go of the urgency we so often feel from sunrise to bedtime.

What do places like coffee shops and pubs and cafés and better bookstores offer? Opportunities to have that relaxed experience so you can sit a while, work or converse or lose yourself in a book.

There's not unlimited parking available in downtown Salem, so there has to be some way to allocate and ensure turnover in parking spaces downtown.

But we need to proceed very thoughtfully, and with due respect for the trade offs involved when we make people stress about time whenever they come downtown. We don't want increased parking spot availability to be the result of people deciding that being downtown simply isn't a good experience.

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

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