Still No Parking

I was downtown (St. Paul) this afternoon for work crap. Because I expected to get in and out fast, I rode the bike. Boy was that a mistake. It has been about two months since the end of the semester and the last time I rode into downtown St. Paul and the number of “No Motorcycle Parking” signs has blossomed like dandelions in my backyard. There must be hundreds of places motorcycles are not allowed to park.

If you think future planners are including two-wheeled vehicles in their plans, you are not paying attention. They are slowly working to eliminate every advantage motorcycles and scooters have in light of what everyone in transportation knows will be the next step: self-driving cars. Between our hooligan ways and our marginal contribution to traffic, emissions, and general usefulness, we’re about as popular as cops and as expected to survive into the next generation as dinosaurs.

Consumer Repellants

All Rights Reserved © 2009 Thomas W. Day

Every once in a while, I check out ClusterFox New’s website to find out who is advertising there to be sure I don’t buy anything from their sponsors. It doesn’t mean much to anyone but me, but I’m the only guy I have to satisfy at this late point in life. Likewise, this afternoon--when it turned out that I’d managed to escape my class and arrived early for my wife’s birthday party at my daughter’s home—I found myself with a rare couple of unoccupied hours and an appetite. I’m near downtown Minneapolis, a place with a plethora of great restaurants in nearly every area of the city, and I’m not on a budget or in a hurry. Where do I go?

Dinkytown has great burger joints and designer beer. It also has parking meters and a boatload of underemployed metermaids. Downtown restaurants are practically abandoned buildings at 2PM, but they are surrounded by those damn meters. Riverfront? Nope, brand new meters as of last fall. So, I ended up in a neighborhood bar with “famous” hamburgers and I’m set for the next couple of hours.

The ‘burbs live off of consumers’ rejection of “urban planning” stupidity customer hostility. If I were an owner of a suburban business, I think I’d try to get myself elected to a major city's City Council so that I could increase the number of parking meters and metermaids. I think repelling consumers from the city would be at least as effective as an advertising campaign. I wouldn’t have to pay for the parking meters and metermaids, so on a cost-basis the political campaign might be a lot more effective use of my time and money than advertising. That might explain why so many city council members live outside of the urban centers.

At the least, I think urban business people ought to use accurate terminology when they are describing these meter plagues. I’d call them “consumer repellants.” Parking meters are probably the most effective way to reduce downtown congestion, over-stimulated downtown business activity, and all of the complications that come with customers and money-changing in a living city. Far better to force all of that nasty commerce on to the suburbs where they are better situated to deal with business.

St. Paul, for example, has shed the shackles of capitalism and opted for a purely government-based economy. Every significant downtown building is jammed with city and state offices and workers and that has saved the city from having to mess with sales taxes, traffic, and inflating property taxes. The City of St. Paul is an abandoned ghost town the moment all those city and state employees head back to the suburban homes. So much volume vanishes from the downtown area it almost feels like you’ve entered a low pressure zone if you stick around past 4:30PM in downtown St. Paul.

Minneapolis, on the other hand, has extended metering hours to 10:30PM, so that city’s metermaids prowl the streets looking for stragglers to punish and the rare visitor to downtown restaurants and bars. Duluth just began a major campaign to rid itself of tourists and Canal Park visitors. It will take a few years, but that brilliant strategy will soon solve both city's’ nasty downtown business problems.

For her birthday, this September, my wife wanted a trip to Duluth. Because she was feeling guilty about making me drive our cage through Wisconsin on our anniversary, she pretended she wanted to take the bike. We've done this trip a few dozen times in the last decade and it has always been one of our favorite things to do in Minnesota. The weather report for Duluth was for a 60% chance of rain. She wanted to hang out in Canal Park. Duluth downtown parking is motorcycle hostile and I couldn't think of a good reason to deal with the hassle. I suggested we take the cage so she'd be comfortable. She drove. I read a book.

A couple of years ago, I was forced to travel through downtown Cincinnati and I was amazed at how effective that city’s parking meter solution had been. That large, once-booming downtown was absolutely abandoned on a perfect Saturday afternoon. I think you could walk naked through Cincinnati’s streets and nobody would notice. It was amazing! Cincinnati had such an effective parking meter program that the Amtrak station’s parking lot was teeming with metermaids, like sharks who’d sniffed blood in the water but who’d arrived too late to sample the kill. As I loaded my gear on to my bike in front of the station, two Cincinnati metermaids stopped to warn me that I had ten minutes to move or they’d “have to” ticket me for illegal parking. As I pulled out of the loading zone, they looked absolutely lonely with the station lot back to its natural empty status.

When I toured North Dakota, I was sort of impressed with that state’s attitude toward ghost towns and empty business buildings. It seemed to me that a year or two of abandonment was justification for bulldozing a building or town. I wonder how long it will take for the major cities to take this approach? St. Paul has a “World Trade Center,” but if al Qaeda had blown up that collection of empty office spaces nobody in the state, let alone the nation, would have noticed. The city could save itself a lot of energy by knocking down at least half of the downtown buildings and making something useful out of the space; like more empty parking lots. At least you don’t have to heat a parking lot. It’s not like the city’s metermaids are so busy that adding a couple thousand more spaces to their route would cause an inconvenience.

Who We're Up Against

In response to my Commuting, Again rant against the mediocrity of parking lot technology, Andy Goldfine sent me a copy of the National Parking Association's "newsletter." If this were a less screwed up world, their take on their weird little propaganda rag would be nothing short of hilarious: "PARKING Magazine is the oldest and most respected magazine in the parking industry. With its long-established standard for editorial excellence, PARKING is a dynamic publication that has continually grown over the last 50 years to meet the industry’s constantly changing needs."

The most recent Parking Magazine issue was filled with important, nation-changing articles like:

1) This year's trade promotion to benefit the Parking Industry Institute will feature the following prizes:
1st - $15,000 cash
2nd - $5,000 cash
3rd - Free full registration to the 2009 NPA convention.

2) Sign Up to Play Golf!
Monday, Sept. 15, 2008
Royal Links Golf Club
Las Vegas, Nevada

3) That's it. No #3. Just golf and a raffle. However, if you go to Vegas for the Parking Industry Institute's convention, I'm sure there will be politicians to buy, idiot laws to lobby for, and pitiful excuses for technology to purchase. After all, it's business and business is all about money. Our money.

Obviously, the "the industry’s constantly changing needs" are pretty easily met. Gamble, play golf, buy crappy technology that can't detect 700 pound motorcycles and everyone is happy. I'm sure there will be plenty of seminars on how to get your local municipality to pay for parking garages and other corporate welfare crap at their Parking Industry party in Vegas, but I'm also sure they won't be solving any problems that matter to any working humans.

Since when did parking become an industry? I'll bite, does a parking lot qualify as "systematic labor especially for some useful purpose or the creation of something of value?" I guess, since banking gets the term industry in this secondary definition, "a distinct group of productive or profit-making enterprises," parking is an industry. I'll never use that word with the same respect again. Banking and parking are industries. The world has sunk to new disgusting lows of inactivity and "money for nothing."

Which came first, the lacking of parking access or the limited number of motorcycles as part of the traffic solution?

I found another motorcyclist with an opinion on the parking quandary, Motorcycle Parking in NYC. Among some really depressing detail, he said "Many parking garages, even the open-air lots, will refuse to accept motorcycles. Some parking lot attendants mumble about insurance, some mumble about damages, and some mumble about liability. Some just mumble. You may be able to park by slipping the attendant some cash ($10 is a good start) and putting your bike in some out-of-the-way corner." Yet another good reason to bypass NYC if you are on a motorcycle. When I was on my way back from Nova Scotia last year, passing through the city didn't even come across my radar. Between the security issues with my gear and the traffic hassle, I had no interest in the Big Apple. "The fine for an obscured license plate or registration is $35.00. Any type of cover that goes over your plate or registration sticker is technically obscuring it." If I'd have known that, it would have just been another reason not to visit NYC.

There is an online petition for reasonable motorcycle parking in the City of Dallas, Texas. Dallas is a notorious motorcycle theft zone, dedicated and secure parking is beyond a need and into a necessity for Texas motorcycle commuters. For a city that could see 12 month motorcycle commuting, Dallas is notably motorcycle-free. The last time I visited Dallas, two years ago, I counted exactly 5 motorcycles on the road in 4 days. I have to wonder if Dallas has any motorcycle dealers, based on the tiny number of visible riders?

On the other hand, Seattle is going in the other direction, "Recent changes to the City’s restricted parking zone (RPZ) program mean that motorcycle and scooter users no longer need to purchase a permit to park in an RPZ (effective Jan 1, 2010) . . . More than one motorcycle may occupy a parking space as long as there is sufficient space and all parking regulations are observed. The City has also designated more than 100 parking spaces around the city for the exclusive use of motorcycles and scooters."

Of course, motorcycle traffic in Seattle is substantially above the national norm. Again, which came first: the motorcyclists or the parking availability? As you might have guessed, I have an opinion. I think motorcyclists have to come first. We have to be on the road, in parking spaces, in front of city councils, and causing political trouble while creating improved traffic flow. When we are as much of the daily traffic as Dr. Frazier's picture (at left), we'll have a real say in who gets to park where. Until then, motorcycles in America are nothing more than toys for the wealthy and the Parking Institute will have no reason to consider us along with their raffles, golf games, and politician purchases.

Commuting, Again

I'm back to work, after a summer "off" from my regular job. I'd been to a couple of meetings before school began and one of the motorcycle riding instructors had mentioned that he'd received his first parking pass and hadn't been able to find a place to park in the lot. He mentioned a "no motorcycles" sign, but I blew that off as unlikely. I'd parked in that lot for more than 8 years. On the other hand, in a ten bike parking space over almost a decade, I'm almost always the only bike in the lot.

After getting my pass, my first day at work, I found the parking garage card reader seemed to ignore my presence. I swiped the card over the meter a few times, gave up and rode around the gate. I figured I would sort it out with the parking lot guy when I left. However, when I got to the exit my pass opened the gate and I left without having the conversation. That has worked for me for the last week. Since I'd been clued about the "no motorcycles" thing, I was looking for it and, finally, found it. There is a small sign on the gate mechanism that says, "Automobile Traffic Only NO Motorcycles, Bicycles, Pedestrians."

My employer pays quite a bit for my annual pass, and gives me the option of taking an annual bus pass instead, if I choose to go the public transportation route. So far, the parking mafia guys haven't seen fit to enforce the "no motorcycles" warning. If they do, I'll starting figuring out my bus route again. I drive the cage to work about two months a year and that's more than I want to be driving.

This is an example of the "respect" motorcycles get as a method of transportation in the United States. An entire parking garage, because of incompetently designed traffic management equipment, becomes a "no motorcycles" zone. Substantial space remains useless in the garage because cages can't fit into that space, but bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles could. Rather than welcome those customers and encourage additional business, firs the garage charges the same price for a vehicle that takes up 1/10th to 1/4th of the space. Later, the garage "updates" its crappy equipment and, now, motorcycles are banned altogether.

If you ever wondered why I think corporate America is mismanaged by complete idiots, this one be one of a million reasons. There is no Dummies' Guide or Complete Idiot's text written at a level low enough to reach this kind of moron. This is the kind of business that actively goes out of its way to alienate customers and, then, asks for government assistance when it goes broke.

Getting Parked and My Opinion

A while back, Andy Goldfine asked me to write a Geezer column about motorcycle parking laws and other irrational human activities. I took a first shot at it and sent it to Andy for his opinion. His opinion was "you get more flies with honey than with . . . " whatever the opposite of honey is. He thought I should tone it down so I might have a chance at changing some official opinions rather than hardening their opinions even further. He might be right. At any rate, I toned it down and the column is sitting out there in the temporary ether waiting for my editor, Victor, to decide the time is right for publication.

My personal opinion is that, at least in the United States, things do not get better. About 40 years ago, a Canadian politician came up with a fable that pretty much sums up the way politics works here. He called it Mouseland. The idea, to put it briefly, is the mice keep electing cats to run their country and the cats (surprise!) keep passing laws that make life easier for cats and much worse for the mice. That's the system we've built and we're #1 at it. Nobody has more cats governing the mice than the US. Something to be proud of.

My grandson , Wolf, and I took a short the-week-before-school-starts motorcycle camping trip to Duluth this week. We wandered from the Cities to Duluth through backroads and had a great 270 mile trip to a place that is only 130 miles from home, by freeway. We spend the afternoon and that night at Jay Cooke State Park, one of Minnesota's great unknown natural wonders and a terrific motorcycle road. We hiked a half-dozen miles of the park's trails and camped there Wednesday evening.

The next morning, I headed us to Duluth for breakfast. My goal was a coffee shop/bakery in Canal Park. My wife and I stumbled on to that place on our 40th wedding aniversary two years ago and I thought Wolf would enjoy the atmosphere and great food. When we rolled into Canal Park, I was surprised to discover the place had been decorated with parking meters. Obviously, Duluth is continuing its recessive decline into oblivion and the City Douchebags are doing everything they can to hurry the city's demise. Big sections of this ghost town are littered with parking meters and downtown is about as close to dead as a once-lively city contaminated by braindead officials can be. All of downtown is now metered and the city's parking mafia has turned the city's empty spaces into empty parking lots manned by politically-connected deadbeats. It has the feel of Chicago without any of the rebellious attitude or the architecture.

I didn't have a pocket full of quarters (also known as "metermaid foodstamps") and the new electronic metering system Duluth is using for much of Canal Park is extremely biker-hostile. Instead of plugging a meter in front of your bike, you have to buy a parking pass at a kiosk and find a place on your bike to put the pass. Obviously, cagers will be inclined to rip off the bike pass and put it on their cages. It's also impossible to bag up your bike with your gear under the cover and leave the bike and gear so that Lovely Richard the Metermaid would see the biker had paid his welfare-tariff. I gave up on the Canal Park restaurant and cruised the downtown area looking for a meter-less place for us to eat. Every restaurant was open, but empty. The meters had done their job. Finally, we ended up at a Perkins on the north end of town that had a parking lot. The place was jammed, unlike all of the metered businesses.

I had a brief conversation with an assistant manager when we paid for our meal. He said the downtown meters had caused a boom in their morning business.

Figures.

While we were waiting for our food, I snagged a Duluth paper and read a really funny-sick article about a dude (check out the Duluth Faux News video, it's hilarious) who got into an argument while partying with another dude. To sum it up, the first dude shot and killed the second dude. Within an hour or so, 60 of Duluth's finest had the neighborhood surrounded with So-Where-Are-They'ers dressed in full Iraq invasion outfits. They looked fierce, just like they do in the movies. However, the guy they were surrounding looked like he'd be about as likely to sneak out and run away as Michael Moore. Look at him. He couldn't hide behind a mountain.

After cutting the phone lines, the Duluth cops hid behind armored cars, barricaded the streets into the neighborhood, posed with their automatic weapons for news camera crews, and had a bunch of huddled meetings with each other for five hours. Apparently, messing with a guy and his gun is a lot cooler than their usual metermaiding duties and they wanted to try out all of their gear before they outgrew it. Finally, the guy came out and they loaded him up and went back to patrolling all those parking meters. Now that I know how much firepower is behind a parking violation, I'm going to be even more inclined to spend my money in the burbs.

After breakfast, we gave up on Duluth and headed for Two Harbors. We stumbled on to a great tour of an old steampowered tugboat and a short history lesson from the curator of the lighthouse and museum. We kept going north for a few miles and had lunch on the way back at Betty's Pies. Yeah, we ate a lot for such a short trip. Get over it. It's a guy thing.

On the way back, I decided to put up with the meter crap and parked in front of Duluth Pack. I used my credit card to buy a $0.75 hour and discovered the meter gouges you for an extra quarter if you use a card. Something not advertised on the &^%$# meter kiosk. Since we couldn't close up the gear, we carried it around with us, which finished off any good feelings I had about Canal Park, since it got hot and carrying all our crap limited what we could do and wanted to do. I guess the good side, if you like parking meters, was that the park area was pretty much empty for a perfect last summer week afternoon before school started the next week. I've never seen that before in 12 years of hanging out in Duluth. The meters were doing their job of draining the city of downtown tourists and locals.

We gave up after 1/2 hour and went back to the bike to get the hell out of Duluth. Another biker was parked in our space, which looked like a bad idea, based on what I know of metermaids and city meter laws. As we were packing up, the other bike owner came over to ask about my luggage badges and the V-Strom. Turned out, he was from northern Minnesota and was making his once-a-year trip to Duluth. He hadn't noticed the new parking meter system and was surprised to learn he was parking illegally. I gave him the last 1/2 hour of our pass and left him looking at the damn thing, wondering where to put it so it wouldn't get stolen if he left the bike to get lunch. I recommended the Perkins north of downtown.

It would be cool to believe that the simple stuff, like parking for motorcycles, is fixable. Obviously, there are logical solutions and all of those solutions provide economic and social benefits to a wide range of citizens. However, we're a mousy "conservative nation," which means we're afraid of our shadows and we're even more afraid of pissing off the cats. Political correctness is just another form of mousy-ness. Burying ourselves in make-work jobs like metermaids and stuffing millions of citizens behind bars and hiring another few million to convict and guard them and all of the useless crap government does instead of providing useful services to working citizens is exactly the tactic every other failed dynasty has taken in the history of humanity. I would freakin' love to believe we're going to be different. But I don't.

It's all part of that fear of change and risk avoidance thing we're growing so proud of. One thing we used to know out of our manufacturing experience is that "change happens." You don't have to do a thing and change will happen. Hoping that it won't is stupid. One of the concepts I'd hope people would get from riding motorcycles is that you have to constantly adapt to change; changes in the road, in yourself and your abilities, traffic, weather, and even laws and cops. The cool thing about getting young people into motorcycling is that they might learn this lesson from riding, since they won't learn it in school, from their parents, or from video games. The not-so-cool thing about the Boomers getting into motorcycling is that they are too inflexible to learn anything new. They are constantly surprised when the universe doesn't notice their existence and fails to adapt to their all-important-selves. When they crash and burn, as they will, their reaction is to sue and pass more brainless laws to try to force the world to accommodate them. Like my home state, Kansas, passing laws to require pi to be a nice round 3.

I don't see this getting better. As much as I'd like to believe gentle argument and logical persuasion will convince the cats to allow us mice the right to lane splitting, filtering, multi-bike parking space access, and all of the cool things that motorcycles and motorcycling could bring to culture, I don't believe any of it will happen. Honestly, I think the best I will get is the right (for a while) to be pissed off about the incompetence of city, state, and federal officials and to say something about it. The problem with using sugar to catch flies is . . . who wants to catch a fly? When I see a fly, I always reach for a flyswatter.

I am pissed off. You're right. I used to love visiting Duluth, especially for hanging out around Canal Park. I've spent a small fortune on chocolate penances at Grandma's for my wife, since she often didn't get to go to Duluth with me. The Canal Park Famous Dave's is my 2nd favorite place in that chain. The lift bridge and ship harbor entry are pretty near San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge on my "favorite places" list. But I hate parking meters. I don't care much for metermaids, either (unless they look like these three, Australia knows how to do everything better). From now on, until Duluth meters-up 18th Avenue West in front of Aerostich, I'll probably limit my Duluth sight-seeing to the RiderWearHouse, Jay Cooke Park, and points north of town.

It's a weakness, I know, but human-waste like toll booth operators and metermaids bug me so much that I can't get past that irritation to enjoy the good stuff that's left of the city. There are too many places to be to have to put up with that kind of drivel. If Duluth doesn't want my money, Elie, International Falls, Redwing, and more mid-sized towns than I can count do. (Even some Duluth residents have a clue about what the city's tourist gouging is costing.) Like most Americans, I do as little business as possible in my own downtown, St. Paul, because of the transportation hassle. Between the near total lack of useful public transportation and the miserable parking experience, I'd rather skip downtown and miss out on everything that happens there than risk a $40 parking ticket for some obscure unpublished rule or from being beaten to my car by a metermaid.