Parking meter blues

Touted as a brilliant plan to help reduce traffic congestion in Montreal's downtown core, by detracting us from taking our cars into the city, all it's managed to do is send us to the suburbs. And you can lay the blame squarely on those inefficient, annoying, computerized, money-grubbing parking meters! (Insert" civil servants", instead of "parking meters", and that sentence works just as well).

Like many of you, despite my deepest desire to jump on a bus --newspaper and iPod shuffle in hand-- and allow someone else to drive me to work, I'm unable to take advantage of Montreal's lackluster, but adequate, mass transit system. I'd love to, but being that I live in St. Lambert, I cover Nuns' Island, and our offices are based in LaSalle, with press conferences and interviews on any given day, taking public transportation just isn't feasible.

It might be easy for that anonymous government employee, working for the Federal Bridge Corporation, to pen such literary masterpieces, like "Avoid the fuss; take the bus", which, in the form of overhead electronic billboards, manage to taunt me daily as I cross the Champlain Bridge, but how does a message like that have any pertinence to someone who needs their car on a moment's notice?

I may reside in St. Lambert, but I do everything else in downtown Montreal, so when I say that these silly parking meters have affected my spending habits, they have; and certainly not in the way that mayor Tremblay intended!

I no longer drive downtown for pleasure. The new state-of-the-art parking meters, touted as "time and energy savers", are "anything but" in my opinion. First off, what brilliant individual was behind the decision to enforce a maximum of two (2) hours' parking on the street? Let THEM try and see a movie and make it back in time to their car before their meter expires! It can't be done! Trust me, I've tried.

So now drivers stay in the suburbs, where parking is free (both in terms of money and hassle), or park in a parking lot. In both cases, the city is not the winner. Where are the benefits for shop owners in Montreal's downtown core, if everyone is avoiding their area? Why would I bother driving downtown to shop, eat, have a drink, when I know I will be forced to stop everything I'm doing in less than 120 minutes and frantically run to fork over another $6 if I want to enjoy the privilege of a downtown stay? Unlike the kids lining up outside a club on St. Laurent on a Saturday night, making it difficult to get in somewhere won't make me want to get in even more; it will just make me leave.

Who knows, maybe it's just me; maybe I fail to see the genius behind the idea. Or maybe I'm just unable to see anything past the current administration's greed…