But, apparently the city is trying to make it costlier to park on the street so that people will seek off-street parking. It's a "performance parking" system that charges you for your occupancy. I guess it's like an even meaner meter? Is that what it is?
Anyhow, there is a meeting about this tonight. I imagine many of you are now annoyed and/or outright angry.
A public meeting on the Columbia Heights pilot program is set for 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Kelsey Temple Church of God at 1435 Park Road, NW.
For more information about the meeting, please contact Damon Harvey at 202-671-0493.
2 comments:
Well, not surprisingly, the WTOP story left a lot out. As I understand things (please correct if any of this is wrong):
1. The person in the WTOP story who's cruising around wasting gas might very well be a resident trying to park within some reasonable distance of his/her house and not able to because of spillover visitor parking. The problem in CH is that shoppers/diners/commuters who park on the unmetered residential streets near restaurants, the Metro station, and DCUSA are crowding out resident parking. This plan tries to keep visitors from holding those parking spaces for long periods of time.
2. The performance restrictions wouldn't be universal, but rather on only one side of a street, for example. The other side would continue with the current parking regulations.
3. Residents with a valid Zone 1 parking sticker, and visitors with a valid visitor's parking pass, would be exempt from performance-parking restrictions at all times.
Most residents are strongly in favor of this as I understand it, because it will make it easier for them to park in their own neighborhood. There is indeed plenty of metered and off-street parking for visitors to CH (DCUSA has more empty parking spaces than you could possibly imagine). So this is really a question of balancing interests.
The meeting is to evaluate the program so far and to discuss expanding it to a wider area of the neighborhood.
the harder it is from people from outside the neighborhood to park on the street, the happier I am.
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