Saturday, June 13, 2015

Today at 5 pm it took 30 minutes to move 8 blocks on Palm Blvd. To get from 34^th Avenue to Rifle Range Road took 1 hour.

And it will just keep getting worse as tri-county development races along and IOP is conveniently located at the end of 526.

Of course city council could have done something, anything, to restrict parking, but instead of making some decisions, which, admittedly would make some residents angry, they instead decided to pay a consultant $150,000 to come up with some “solutions.”

You all know how this works.  They implement the consultant’s solutions and then when a resident is pissed off, council tells the resident, “Hey, I agree with you, but this is what the expert consultant recommended.”

The trouble here is the consultant, Stantec, recommended a paid parking system that would be so complicated to implement and enforce that it would take the geniuses at Google to get it up and running.  So council canned the idea and went back to more talking and planning.  And so again this summer we have gridlock on Palm Blvd.

Gridlock caused by daytrippers who contribute not one penny to fund the infrastructure that must be put in place to accommodate them.  So how does the city get them to pay for the extra services they generate?

How about limiting the free parking so they must park in the city lot that is virtually never at capacity except for a few very busy days?  How about doing it now?  Why wait?

This simple solution addresses 2 problems: The daytrippers start paying their way and there is much less congestion on the streets in the residential areas.

Yeah, it is that simple. But as Tina Turner sang, “You see we never do nothing nice, easy.”  That’s our city council for ya.