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Letter to the editor

Beach lots may be best with the human touch

By A TIMES EDITORIAL
Published September 18, 2007

Clearwater officials are thinking about doing away with attended parking lots on Clearwater Beach and bringing back parking meters. Beachgoers wouldn't have to worry about lugging around five pounds' worth of quarters to feed the meters during a day at the beach. These meters would be modern ones that would accept plastic credit cards in addition to coins, and they could be fed by the hour or by the day.

"I don't think the current system is working," Mayor Frank Hibbard said recently, explaining that it is frustrating to spot an open space in an attended parking lot but be unable to get to it because the entrance is blocked by a "Lot Full" sign. With too few parking spaces on the beach as it is, officials think none should sit empty while motorists circle the beach looking for parking.

City officials might want to study history before they make a final decision. Most of the public parking on Clearwater Beach used to be metered. City officials made a deliberate decision to abandon metered parking at the big lots at Pier 60 and South Gulfview and hire attendants to collect parking fees - and it wasn't just because people complained about having to carry coins.

One of the reasons the city chose attended parking lots was massive complaints about parking tickets. Parking enforcers patrolled the lots constantly, ready to slap a ticket on a windshield as soon as a meter expired. That was bad public relations for the city's primary tourist attraction, city officials concluded. Having an attendant who collected parking fees on the way out of the lot was more tourist-friendly, and attendants could answer tourists' questions and give them a cheery "Thank you!" on the way out.

Perhaps a bigger motivation for the city was responding to the complaints of nearby hotel operators about noise, litter, drinking and other bad behavior in the lots when they were simply metered. There was also a tendency for people to line up in the lots waiting for someone to leave a space, and there were occasional disputes over who was entitled to a freed-up space.

While police did check the lots on their regular beach patrols, they had too much to do to babysit parking lots. City officials believed converting the lots to attended ones would prevent many of the problems that existed in unattended, metered lots.

And they were right. There have been far fewer complaints about problems in the large parking lots since attendants were hired. Attendants keep an eye on the visitors and the vehicles, and it is easy to close a lot when it gets full or after a certain hour of the night.

Before officials consider returning to meters, they may want to consider whether the loss of attendants would lead to new complaints from hotel operators and guests, especially since the trend on Clearwater Beach is toward high-end hotels and, perhaps, a more demanding beach visitor. How will those visitors respond to middle-of-the-night parties in unattended parking lots?

Attended parking is expensive for the city, and because people don't have to return to their cars to feed the meter, spaces do not turn over as often. Both factors are reasons the city is considering returning to meters to control the limited amount of parking on the beach.

However, modern parking meters, often called pay stations, aren't cheap. The city estimates the cost at $10,000 to $20,000 each, but each one handles as many as 30 parking spaces.

If City Council members are inclined toward metered parking, they have wisely agreed to conduct a test first in one of the smaller beach lots to see how users respond to them. No one in Clearwater City Hall wants a fiasco like St. Petersburg experienced in 1998, when unhappy users demanded the city remove its new, French-made pay stations downtown because they were too difficult to understand and use.

[Last modified September 17, 2007, 21:26:32]