City must be smart about parking
You might as well start budgeting to spend a few hundred dollars annually to pay for the privilege of shopping in downtown Saratoga.
Yes, the plan is to implement something called the “Smart Parking System” in Saratoga. The key “smart” result is: parking meters.
Published reports state that “the city issued an RFP seeking the services of a professional parking consultant/management team to study, design and implement Smart Parking System … the stated goal… is to net the maximum financial benefit to the city balanced with downtown business vitality and efficient traffic management.” Possibilities include higher pricing in popular parking spots, restricted timeframes in such spots and “adopting license plate recognition to track vehicles that overstay their time limits”. The city council website includes a marketing campaign to sell us on this initiative. It did not sell me.
The key words in the above paragraph: “seeking the services” and “to implement.” So unless the above statements are remarkably poorly written, this is a done deal: parking meters are going to be installed in downtown Saratoga.
As to “efficient traffic management,” regardless of the sales pitch for it …I do not believe that it will do much of anything.
As to benefiting “downtown business vitality”… I have to seriously wonder if that prediction is true. I tallied the impact to Saratoga downtown businesses if just one person (me) does not want to be charged to shop in Saratoga. If I decide to get the same services elsewhere, the yoga studio will lose $1,500; the restaurant and food stores I visit will lose at least $4,000 a year; other entities will lose maybe an additional $1,000 a year. So just one person’s deciding to not give yet money to a city government will cost Saratoga businesses $6,500, or some fraction thereof.
So I suspect some businesses may see their revenue drop, at least for a time, after the meters are installed. I recently spoke with a new Saratoga resident who recently moved from Binghamton, where she had a business. She told me that after Binghamton installed parking meters, her business’s income dropped significantly. “People did not want parking meters. It’s a bother. Even though there was a free garage a few blocks away, they didn’t want to change their habits. They just stopped coming to my store.”
Businesses don’t have the incredible luxury, as the city does, of a guaranteed cash flow, plus the ability to increase taxes when necessary to increase their income. Businesses have to be creative and aggressive to earn their income. So I wonder why the city can’t be smarter in this matter… by being more creative; looking at ways to operate more financially efficiently; exploring ways to cut expenses, versus initiating a non-creative - and very much despised move such as installing parking meters.
The real “smart” one in this scenario is the company selling the parking meters. Those folks know full well how to sell municipalities on the benefits of meters. As the former head of marketing for numerous outfits, to me “SmartParking” seems just a marketing ploy by the “professional parking consultant/management” (i.e. parking meter salespeople) to distract people from the city’s stated #1 goal: “to net the maximum financial benefit to the city”. At the expense of citizens and visitors.
One thing I do know: most people are sick and tired of continually being nicked for more money to fund any government. Especially when paying, in this case, for what is little more than a possibly (very) costly …nuisance.
I also have to wonder why the city needs more money so desperately that it will change the ambiance of its downtown? I don’t see any need for new services. So why can’t the city live within its means… like I do?
I have spent lots of corporate money on marketing research and thus know that casual surveys do not yield accurate research results. But in talking with people about parking meters in Saratoga, every single person does not like the idea. And in this case, I bet that result actually does reflect the feelings of the majority of people.
I just returned from a few weeks in Miami, where feeding parking meters became a daily and costly nuisance. I don’t need more parking meters in my life. There are other local governments that don’t force people to pay for the privilege of spending money in their own municipality. And if meters are installed in Saratoga, I will probably think to myself, “I don’t need Saratoga”. I certainly won’t visit as often. And I imagine I won’t be alone.
I hope the people in city government do not decide to penalize their own citizens - their friends and neighbors - for shopping and enjoying their own city. If they do, it will be just one more step on the path to weakening the city-in-thecountry charm that makes Saratoga special.