Oh boy! A parking meeting!!

If we have hundreds of millions to blow on a giant unneeded bridge,
then we certainly can afford to take real care and spend real money
to help sustain downtown.

Got an invitation to a parking meeting next week from Jim Vu, a nice guy who has become a landlord downtown and who works at a local (very) bank:

Hello Downtown Business Owners,

I would like to invite all of you to a downtown parking meeting.  The details are as follows:

Tuesday, October 28th, 2014
Whitlock's, 455 Court St NE
5:30PM to 6:30PM
Guests:  Mayor Anna Peterson, City Manager Linda Norris, and City Councilor Chuck Bennett

Agenda - Working towards a parking solution beyond February 2015.

Please RSVP to me so that we will have adequate seating for those in attendance

Caused me to review past parking articles posted here at LOVESalem:


http://lovesalem.blogspot.com/search?q=parking

I think a number of those old posts hold up pretty well.

Parking is a lot harder than many people seem to think; easy to get wrong, tough to get right, and experience from different places and times (gained during different economic conditions) is not necessarily as transportable as cars are.  Cities, especially in their downtowns, are unique places, and are actually complex eco-systems.

They aren't just malls without roofs.

If we take a big-picture view and use this friction as an opportunity to generate sparks for real, system wide improvements, maybe it will be for the best. Here's hoping.