News item: As of Jan. 1, Victoria parking enforcement will be handled by city employees instead of the Commissionaires. A kinder, gentler approach is being promised.
I got out of the car, decided to roll the dice, walked right past the parking meter without paying.
"Freeze, dirtbag!"
A uniformed man had emerged from nowhere to block my path, was pointing a handgun at my chest with a two-handed grip. Looked like a cop, but had a happy face where the badge should be. Right, one of the city's new "parking ambassadors."
"Aren't you supposed to be more friendly?" I asked.
He grimaced. "Freeze, please!"
"Not sure you're getting the spirit of the thing," I said. "Let's try this again, kinder and gentler."
He took a deep breath. "Have you lost weight?"
"Better. Keep going."
"That's a cute top you're wearing!"
I shook my head. "Too girlie. Rein it in a little, Tex."
This more huggable approach to parking enforcement is going to take all of us a little time. Victorians are used to the traditional model, a regime whose reputation for, um, efficiency is legendary as far away as Switzerland, where young watchmakers and bankers keep posters of our Commissionaires taped to their bedroom walls. If other laws were policed as rigorously as Victoria's parking rules, we wouldn't have to lock our doors at night.
The positive is that this keeps people from hogging all the good parking spots and choking access to businesses. It also helps the city raise $16 million a year in parking revenue. The downside is that getting a ticket feels like stepping in dog crap: you feel annoyed, victimized. Parking laws penalize people who don't feel like criminals.
(Case in point: The Times-Colonist once had a reporter who habitually chucked her parking tickets into the back seat of her car, where she left them unpaid, drifting like a pile of leaves that had been raked up but then forgotten. Alas, this ultimately resulted in her being hauled off to the cop shop after a routine traffic stop.
By the time she got back to the newsroom, she was spitting mad, had all but equated her incarceration with that of Nelson Mandela and was ready to go all Baltimore on the police.)
The city has done some good stuff with parking lately. More than six per cent of street transactions are now conducted via a handy new phone app that lets drivers start and stop a parking session, paying only for the time they use.
Incentives meant to shift on-street parking to the parkades have been a tremendous success since they were brought in last fall. The first hour is now free in city parkades, as is parking after 6 p.m. The rate has been lowered to $2 an hour. As a result, parkade use jumped 70 per cent in April from the same month last year.
At the same time, the resulting drop in parkade revenue has been less than five per cent, not as much as anticipated, says Brad Dellebuur, the city's manager of transportation and infrastructure design. The real aim -- freeing up street parking -- has been met. "Generally, people are seeing it's easier to park downtown," Dellebuur said Wednesday.
This is the point of all this: to make people feel good about coming downtown. "The existing structure is enforcement with customer service," Dellebuur says. The new model would flip the emphasis. Dellebuur repeatedly uses that "customer satisfaction" phrase when describing the goal of the shift to parking ambassadors.
What this looks like in practice is still a bit spongy, though. Perhaps, say, more opportunity to resolve disputes on the street instead of marching down to the appeals office with smoke coming out of your ears. The idea is to keep people happy -- though don't confuse that with a lack of enforcement. "I don't know that that will necessarily translate into fewer tickets written," Dellebuur says.
That's the thing: even if the parking ambassadors dot the "i" on the violation notices with a little heart, a parking ticket is still a parking ticket.
Can't fault the objective, though: "We want people to feel like they're welcome downtown."
