Doesn’t add up

I HAVE some questions about the parking bays/fee/marshals in the CBD.

I read that Street Parking Solutions pays the City R681 664 per month (Cape Times, October 17). I further read that marshals manage nine bays each, and daily monetary targets quoted were R850 and R795.

Now I have no idea how many bays there are in the city, and I suppose that the fees mentioned are at the upper end of the scale… I suppose there must be thousands (rather than hundreds) of bays in the CBD? Let us say there are 1 000 bays, or 111 groups of nine, and let’s be conservative, and put the average daily target per bay at R600 – this would mean that a minimum of R1 398 600 is collected in a 21-working day month… if there are 1 500 bays, over R2 million – a tidy revenue for a private company.

Quite apart from the way the marshals are reportedly treated, I am of the opinion that parking fees in the CBD are basically a form of taxation, and revenues should be applied to maintenance and upkeep of public facilities. Nonetheless, even if the parking fees only provide decent employment for 150-plus unemployed persons, that would be great – at the very least these people should earn a respectable income, with proper security and benefits. Otherwise, our parking money is just being creamed off by some fat cat private company (Oh, where have I heard that before?).

Please may we, the people who pay those fees, and who live and work in the city, know the real numbers?