Man bites meter

On December 5th, I wrote about a transportation consultation/survey that I attended at Ottawa City Hall. In the entry I mentioned that answers given by the downtown core attendees seemed to be unanimous that the cure to Ottawa's transportation woes was to charge road tolls and higher parking fees to those gas guzzling, pollution spewing, grid-lock causing commuters that drove in from the (ugh) suburbs.

Guess what, the city is raising parking fees to $3/hour and eliminating free parking at meters for weekends and evenings. You would think that the centre town folks would be ecstatic including their generally left of centre politicians.

But no. Clive "I cycle to work" Doucet calls it a bone head move. "It's out of control," bellows he. He argues that parking meters were intended to keep traffic moving. His logic befuddles the best of us. I thought that Clive had always told us that we needed public transit to keep the traffic flowing.

"People are just not going to come downtown," cries Diane Holmes. George Bedard calls it "negative, bull-headed". He goes on to say, "If they want to kill downtown, they're certainly doing it."

I have a solution. Just eliminate those pesky polluting buses from the downtown core. They just impede traffic flow when I am looking for a parking spot. Plus those darn bus stops take up so much prime parking space on the roads. Finally, we subsidize the transit system to the tune of 50% of the cost to run it. Take the savings from the bus system and plough it into subsidized parking fees.

Hey, who says that the suburbanites can't come up with ideas for the urbanites?

Give me a call sometime, Clive... we'll do tofu!