Meter Maids Eat Their Young (8 page)

“Yeah,” Philo said.

No wonder I had felt spooked walking by the kid. I looked back over my shoulder, expecting to see Willy T standing behind me, shovel in hand. Ghosts. Everywhere I turned there were ghosts. Damn, but I was tired of all the ghosts.

“Mother?” I said.

“Died in childbirth. She was a boozer, I'm told. Like Willy.”

“No one was quite like Willy T,” I said more to myself than him. “Trust me. Look, I didn't come here for a trip into memory's minefield.”

“Obviously not,” he said. “I imagine the Mangler brought you to my door.”

The smile was back. I wondered why.

“Do you know something about the Mangler?”

“I know a few things about parking meters,” he said. “Nothing about the destroyer of parking meters, though I certainly applaud … er … his actions.”

“What exactly is CARPE?” I said.

“Citizens Against Repressive Parking Enforcement,” he replied. “Made it up myself. The acronym, I mean. Well, the whole organization, I suppose. Such as it is. We have a website and everything. Quite a few hits, considering the local nature of the thing. There is growing discontent with parking enforcement around the world. I thought the name had some zing to it, wouldn't you agree?”

“Zing. Yeah. Tell me about this,” I said, plucking the leaflet I'd been given from my pocket and holding it in the air.

“You want to know why meters should be banned?”

“I want to know why it was handed specifically to me, why there's an address scrawled across the bottom of the page when no other flyer I've seen has any kind of contact information printed on it.”

I stared at him. His smile was broad. The overhead light sparkled off his earring.

“Perhaps it's an invitation to learn more about parking meters and why they should be banned. Got a morning to kill? As for why there is no contact information, let's just say it's not a good idea to be seen to be opposing the DPE.”

I thought about what HL had said earlier in the morning; about how the DPE was trying to quash my stories; about how he was getting no support.  About whoever was driving that SUV.

“Yeah, I've got a morning to kill.”

As Tom Philo settled into his chair he said, “You know the history of the parking meter, I assume?”

We were sitting in the backroom now, the shop closed up. The scent I had smelled earlier was stronger back here. It made me as uneasy as the overstuffed chair I sank into. The chair was big enough to accommodate Arnold Schwarzenegger. Philo had made tea and I balanced a delicate china cup in one hand and my notebook and pencil in the other.

I've never understood the point of those china tea cups. They hold but a gulp and a half of liquid and who but a small child could get their finger through that tiny handle to hold the thing? Rearranging the small items on the wicker table next to me with my elbow, I set down the cup and turned back to Philo. My knees nearly in my face.

“I do,” I said. “I know they were created to alleviate traffic congestion, or that was the pitch, anyway. I've never seen much evidence of it.”

“The only true relief for traffic congestion is the tow-away zones on the major commute routes in and out the city. Which, I might add, are metered as well. Still, opening up those extra lanes during the rush hour does help move the traffic in and out. The meters, however, all meters in fact, may actually cause more congestion, but I'll get to that in a moment. You're aware, of course, that there are over five million parking meters in use in America?”

“That many?”

“Indeed. With more being installed every day. The original meters clipped the patron for five cents an hour, plus a twenty-dollar fine should they forget the time. Today they're as much as two dollars an hour with fines as high as fifty dollars. More in certain restricted areas like parking for the handicapped and loading zones.”

“Yeah. I'm aware of that.”

“Are you also aware that the very first ticket issued was challenged in court?”

I didn't know that. “On what grounds?” I said.

“That the streets are public space and you can't charge the public to utilize what is theirs.”

“And the public lost?”

“In fact, they did. But not on those grounds. The defense team knew that it was basically charging a rental fee for space that belonged to the public. They also knew they would never get away with that defense. Instead, they argued that the revenue from the parking meters, and the inevitable tickets, was to pay for parking enforcement.”

I thought that one over a moment. It was very twisted logic.

“And they won with that argument?”

“Indeed.”

“Wait, let me get this straight. We feed the meter—”

“A device none of us asked for,” Philo said. “Nor were we consulted over their placement.”

“Right. We feed the meter to pay someone to patrol the meter we didn't ask for and give us a ticket if we park beside it for too long. That doesn't make any sense.”

“No. It doesn't. But that's how parking meters overcame their first legal challenge and we've been tossing nickels, dimes and quarters into their gaping maw ever since. That little tidbit is lost to history. And now that the legality is essentially out of the way, city councils all across the country have a number of ersatz reasons for sticking a meter alongside any spot big enough to park a car.”

“Such as?”

“Turnover. Force people to move their cars so others can park. Of course, that's only valid in shopping areas so it doesn't explain the prevalence of meters in every part of town.”

He picked up his tea, sipped it and set the cup back down.

“Forcing people onto public transportation is another dubious reason given for the parking meter's existence, though that, too, is ludicrous. In most metropolitan areas, public transportation either doesn't exist in any meaningful way or, where it does, is wholly inadequate for the needs of the communities it serves. This inadequacy leads to frustration, which leads to more people driving, which leads to less revenue, which leads to further deterioration of service … and on and on in a downward spiral.

“The problem, of course, is that if people drive, they must park. For them to park, there must be parking places. On average, a person works eight hours a day. You don't find many eight-hour parking meters: Thirty minutes, sixty, two hours tops. It doesn't compute and this is where the whole theory of metered parking falls apart.”

“Fall apart? “ I said. “I'm not sure I understand that.”

“It's simple, really. As with anything, there is an obvious cost and a hidden cost. With metered parking, the hidden cost is quite high. Now, the obvious cost is the meter itself; its installation and maintenance and, of course, all the people necessary to run a department of parking enforcement, including those who check the meters and write the tickets. This cost is borne by the revenue produced by the meters and the tickets, roughly twenty percent of gross.”

“And the hidden cost?”

“Businesses carry the brunt of that,” he said. “And then there is the issue of lost space.”

“Lost space?”

“Yes. You see, the state mandates the size of a metered parking space, pretty much to accommodate the largest vehicle that might park there, plus several feet fore and aft. But not everyone has large cars, especially in this day of escalating fuel prices. What this means is, a Volkswagen is allotted as much room as a Cadillac. On a city block with ten meters, only ten cars can park. Without those meters, you could likely squeeze in thirteen, maybe fourteen cars. Because the block is metered, nearly twenty-five percent of that block is lost to parking space.”

“Okay. What about the loss to business?”

“Easy. Two-hour parking meter. Eight-hour day. Anyone parked at a meter will have to run out to their car three, possibly four times a day. More if they get a meter with less time. Figure ten to twenty minutes each trip, call it fifteen on average, and you're looking at an hour of productivity loss per worker per day.”

I sat back in my chair, pulled out a small sharpener and considered what Philo had told me while I ground down another quarter inch of my pencil.

“You said the operational costs are borne by the revenues from the meters and the tickets issued. What kind of money are we talking about here?”

“That would depend,” he said, reaching for his tea. “Are we talking your typical, hypothetical city, as we have been so far? Or are we talking about here?”

“Here is where the Mangler is,” I said.

For the first time since I met him, Tom Philo's countenance turned dark, the teacup hovering half way to his lips. He set it back on the table and leaned forward.

“For that,” he said, “We'll need a little history lesson.”

Philo sat back in his chair.

“Before Jefferson Cooper took over as head of the DPE,” he said, “this town had roughly three hundred city blocks covered by meters.”

“How many meters would that be?”

“Well, on average, twenty meters to a block,” he said.

“So, six thousand meters in all,” I said.

“Close enough,” Philo said. “On blocks with a bus stop you might have eighteen meters. On a longer block, maybe twenty-two. All in all it works out to twenty per.”

“Okay,” I said, writing down the numbers in my notebook.

“These meters were concentrated in the downtown area, in and around the shopping areas. These meters were all of the two-hour variety and cost one dollar to park the full two hours. They operated six days a week, excluding holidays, from 8:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m..”

I did a quick calculation. “Five bucks a day,” I said. “Per meter.”

“Correct,” he said, “provided the meter was used all day, which most of them were. Excluding Sundays and holidays gives you about three hundred days of meter operation. Three hundred days at five dollars a day times six thousand—”

“Jesus,” I said. “That's nine million dollars a year. I had no idea.”

“Few people do, believe me. They think just as you, nickel and dime. How much could that be? But it adds up.” He shifted in his chair, checked his tea cup and found it empty. “More tea?” he said.

“No thanks, I'm fine.”

“Keep in mind,” he said, pouring tea from a ceramic pot shaped like a frog, “we had a relatively low number of meters for the size of this town. There were also a number of city-owned lots leased out to private companies to be used as temporary parking areas for commuters. These were plots of land that might one day be built on. Rather than let the land go to waste, they were used for parking. The city collected a small fee from the lot operators; the operators were obliged to lay down asphalt and remove it should the site be sold for develop.m.ent. Everyone was happy.”

“And then Cooper came to town.”

“Humph,” Philo said, his expression turning darker. “Indeed he did. Right from the start Cooper doubled the number of city blocks covered by meters. They replaced the six thousand two-hour meters with half-hour meters that cost as much as the two-hour meters. To that they added another six thousand one-hour meters to the mix. In the last eighteen months, they've more than doubled that number again. Today there are something like twenty-six thousand meters covering thirteen hundred blocks. We have meters surrounding the park. There are meters out in the industrial part of town and on the residential streets nearest to the downtown area. On top of that, they began closing the temporary lots. You see ‘Under Construction' signs going up all over the downtown area but never any construction.”

I had noticed and said so.

“Quite a phenomena, isn't it? To drive through the downtown area, one would assume a boom town when in fact not a single new construction start has occurred in over three years.”