It is quite interesting that we taxpayers pay for roads and highways to get to destinations all over the country. Then, when we get there, to places like New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Houston, L.A., or to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras, we spend half our time driving around looking for a parking space. Not being local, when we find a space, we too often find out why the locals didn’t park there: We return to find our car has been broken into and our valuables lost, if the car is there at all.

Too often, as we or our customers go about our business, our cars are ticketed, our tires are booted and sometimes the cars are towed. In places where this occurs, people who venture into such areas are seen as easy marks for the most expensive parking around. The real cost of parking must include the revenue taken with a ticket book, a tire boot and a tow truck hook. These tactics are very bad for business but serve to backdoor money into government or other coffers.

It seldom occurs to people that the too common lack of parking is a created shortage. If we can plan roads upon which people will travel (people, not cars), we can certainly create places for the people to park their cars while they do what they came to town to do.

If we want to know why there is a shortage of parking, all we have to do is follow the money. Parking is mainly a cash business in this country, even “free” parking. As stated, in most cities, there is never enough parking. In fact, in most major metropolitan areas, forty to ninety percent of all downtown traffic is simply people driving around, looking for parking. It’s a game of chance which is intended to drive one into expensive lots or structures where cash is the name of the game. It is estimated that the amount of cash that is never reported to the tax man in New York City alone, runs between fifteen and twenty million dollars a day. Putting cash into parking is like putting water into one’s pockets, it just goes away. Recently, Toronto Canada for example, went to a system of using credit and prepaid computer cards in their parking meters. With the cash taken out of parking, revenue from metered parking jumped sixty percent, virtually over night.

In Los Angeles, some of the nastiest and most aggressive people on the streets are Meter Maids. The Beetles song about the “lovely Rita, meter maid,” certainly wasn’t written in L.A. The real cost of parking also includes all the tickets and the stress of being held up by “Lovely Rita.” Add to that, the ill will created by such predators, sent out among us in cities small and large to hold us up like so many “highwaypersons.” Add to that the cost of towing, almost always a cash business, and much of that “revenue” vanishes as well. This is not to imply that all city officials in your town are on the take. I am sure the officials in your city are all perfectly honest. It’s everyone else’s cities where shortages of parking are nursed and the parking operated as a source of vanishing cash.

As citizens, we must be aware of this situation and not tolerate any lack of adequate safe parking, and we are the ones who must put an end to the ways our public servants “tax” us for trying to get where we are going to do what we want to do there. This is our field of play, not theirs.

Said another way, the most expensive parking is that parking we don’t have. It is that missing parking that has us driving in circles looking for a space. Nowhere is the real cost of parking greater than for the business owners who want people to come to their place of business. It is not uncommon for businesses to literally starve for customers for lack of adequate safe and convenient parking. It has been said for example, that in San Francisco, people can do anything in the street except park.

Along the “Miracle Mile,” in Coral Gables Florida, it’s a miracle if one can find a space. To “keep turnover going and so provide parking,” the city people went to meters that have to be fed every twenty minutes but to a maximum of one hour. Meanwhile, meter maids stalk the lunch crowd from the seats of a three wheeled Cushman scooters, chalking people tires and issuing citations while people who own those cars try to conduct business lunches while running out after twenty and forty minutes to feed the meters quarters. Three chalk marks and the car is towed!

Ask any city and they will say that the parking meters are as cheap as they can make them. Ask the restaurant owner in such a place and too often, they will tell you that parking enforcement is putting them out of business.

Being robbed at the curb by parking enforcement people is not the only danger the public face. It just happens to be a fact that the most dangerous thing a person can do in this country, outside the home, is to park or retrieve one’s vehicle. Parking structures and parking lots present a virtual smorgasbord for a wide variety of criminals to pick and choose victims.

Criminals spend their time planning crimes. It’s what they do. They pick the places and time to commit their crimes. Security is seldom adequate. A criminal can keep parking lots and structures under surveillance and pick their victims carefully. They pick the moment to strike. Outside of date rape, the most frequent haunt of the rapist on college campuses today is the campus parking lot or parking structure. These afford almost unlimited places to hide and from which to spring a violent attack. If the intended victim brings a friend along tonight to get her car, the stalker can always wait for another day or night. It is never a good idea for a woman to enter a parking structure alone at night and in many areas, ever. While the odds overall are with her, one of the highest costs of parking, is too often the lingering emotional cost of the trauma of becoming a victim

The time has come for all of us to begin demanding adequate, safe and secure parking at and around the destinations we want to or must visit. We must be free form the harassments and money making parking gimmicks of municipalities, just as laws now prohibit speed traps on highways.

Only when this is accomplished, will we see traffic controlled by taking off the streets those people who are just driving around, looking for parking spaces and burning up $3 and higher gallons of gasoline along the way.