 |
||||||||
 |
|
|||||||
|
||||||||
|
 |
With parking spots scarce, a new sport may emerge
© St. Petersburg Times The young cop, I heard through the grapevine one morning back in the early 1970s, had done something really stupid -- been caught in his squad car sleeping when he should have been on patrol. When I wanted to talk to him the next morning, I just drove around downtown Dade City until I saw a bright yellow enclosed three-wheel Cushman motor scooter with a young scowling face peering through the windshield. Former Police Chief Norris Nixon would use the ticket scooter for punishment because officers giving out parking tickets, even when they're armed, tend to get screamed at a lot. The memory was brought back to me by the news that the Dade City Commission will consider tonight whether to begin putting time limits, or even -- gasp! -- parking meters on downtown parking spaces. It could grow to be a hot controversy. Some merchants, aware that the city's free parking is a draw, especially with a downtown full of antique stores and anchored by a restaurant that encourages leisurely dining, think anything that will limit parking and scare away customers is a bad idea. Others, and they tend to be anonymous most of the time, have business that rely on turnover and would rather see the spaces available for their customers. And, for people who work downtown, limits on parking will be just about as popular as a goldenrod centerfold at a hay fever sufferers' convention. Parking is, especially during the busy winter season, at a premium downtown. Even plainly marked private parking spaces are violated regularly, and double parking is sometimes more the rule than the exception. Even the most law abiding of the city's residents have always considered flouting the parking laws to be kind of a sport. When the ticket cop came around marking tires with a piece of white chalk on an aluminum extension rod, the word would go through the downtown area in nothing flat. The most honest of us would go move our cars to another spot. The slightly less honest would go out and roll the car a few feet one way or the other so that the chalk marked portion of the wheel was in a different position, allowing us to argue that we had left and returned during the marking period (this to a cop who has only heard the same explanation 30 or 40 times during his or her shift). The even more dishonest would simply go out, wet their fingers and rub off the chalk mark, hoping nobody would notice. And parking tickets were hotly debated too, even back when they were $2.50. Nobody, and I mean nobody, who rode the ticket scooter got through a shift without having some loudmouth explain that he or she paid the officer's salary with taxes and asking why the cop wasn't out chasing real criminals. My all-time favorite parking story came about a few years after the scooter was retired. The building where our office used to be situated had a curb that was supposedly a fire lane (although it wasn't marked with signs). Most of the curb had a bright yellow line painted on it, but there was a 20-or-so-foot portion with no yellow line. Because some parts of my career involved reporting on things that made some cops unhappy, I always scrupulously obeyed the law and would park against the curb only when the unpainted space was available. Some of the city's better-heeled occupants would openly park next to the line, relying on the law of small-town economics that says that Mercedeses and Porsches were immune from parking tickets while 10-year-old sedans with primer and/or duct tape in evidence weren't. When I asked a cop one morning why he was writing me a ticket, he answered, "You're parked next to a yellow line." I pointed out that there was no yellow line where I was parked. "But there used to be," he said. "You're writing me a ticket for parking where a yellow line used to be?" I asked in disbelief. "Yep," he said. "Want to complain?" I allowed that, since $5 was a cheap price to pay for a ready-made column, I had no complaints. Stay tuned, if the city decides to limit or charge for parking tonight, for more of the same.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
|
Times columns today Mary Jo Melone Jan Glidewell Darrell Fry Martin Dyckman From the Times North Suncoast desks |
