Ever since I saw the guy running the chain gang shoot poor Cool Hand Luke, I've been very careful around parking meters. (Busting a meter was what put Luke, as played by Paul Newman, in the jailhouse.) You remember the scene. Just before Luke gets it, he repeats his oft-used line, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."
Temptation has visited your correspondent again, however, as one of the city of Raleigh's brand new parking meters sits within sight of my office on South McDowell Street. It's ol' MCD8, or as we've dubbed it, "Mac." Yep, Mac is available to you good people 8-5 weekdays. Parking's a buck an hour, credit cards accepted.
No receipt, though. Mac says this will show up on your statement.
Mac is rather short and stout. After checking for police officers and deputies, I grabbed Mac right around the neck, just like Luke, and tried to move him around to see just how sturdy he was. He didn't budge.
The instructions are rather extensive.
A sign pops up digitally that says, "Welcome to Raleigh." Interesting. A buck an hour. Welcome to Raleigh! I suppose that beats the alternatives: "Reach for the sky" or "Empty your wallet" or "Get outta town, Pilgrim, or let's see the cash on the barrelhead."
Nice.
And speaking of Pilgrims, not five minutes after I had been visiting with Mac, one Pilgrim walked up to me and said he was parking in Space 248 and what should he do?
I could have explained that he might as well have asked me where to start an I.V. and when to lay the scalpel on the brain stem, but since Mac had already welcomed him to Raleigh, I wanted to oblige.
So we stood there. We punched in his space number, and in all capital letters Mac said, "Space 248 EXPIRED," so we had to look for a place to put in his coins. We read the instructions several times: "Space number," "(arrows) to change time and payment," "OK to confirm payment," "insert and remove card," and then "i to exit or for help."
Anyway, we couldn't get the guy's quarter to go into the machine. Finally, this other sign comes up, where "Welcome to Raleigh" used to be, and it says, "coin payment unavailable." We tried the quarter several times, because a parking meter that won't take a quarter is like a squirrel that won't take an acorn.
Finally, though, the Pilgrim was directed by Mac to the other meter. Yes, there are two of them in the same block on one side of South McDowell. The city doesn't want to leave a single pocket unpicked. So the Pilgrim came back by and told me it took his quarters and then he pulled out something from City Hall and asked me where it was. He appeared to have a bill of some kind. So he was paying to park so he could go pay his bill with the city.
Welcome to Raleigh!
After he left, I punched a few more numbers into the meter, just to get a feel for it, and then this sign pops up "Official Use Only," and I figure, that's it. The spotlights are going to hit me, and a voice over a loudspeaker is going to shout, "Hit the ground, punk, and spread 'em!" and then the S.W.A.T. team is going to descend and I'll be taken to Guantánamo.
All in all, I'm still trying to figure out exactly how this system, which is designed to milk every dime out of every visitor to every corner of pavement in downtown Raleigh, is going to fit into the "downtown revitalization" scheme long advocated by the folks in City Hall. We want people to come downtown, but we're not only going to charge them to park, which we should not, but we're also going to make it harder to pay (old system: quarter in, time remaining shows, that's it; new system: you get the picture) and thus easier to get a $20 ticket. Does this make sense, or does it follow the same sound logic as that used by the lifeboat engineers for the Titanic?
What if, instead, we made all on-street parking free and converted Mac and his mates so they could dispense soda pop, Pale Ale and a nice merlot? Pretty soon everybody would be saying ...
Welcome to Raleigh!
