you don’t need to commission a study to know that if you raise the cost of driving, you remove disposable income that could be spent at the destination retail store.

because of the recession, because of oakland crime, costco, large chain stores, pending mandatory health insurance benefits, etc. small retailers are a rare breed on the brink of extinction. they know it and are very very worried.

how many of your posters have ever run a small business and worried about covering their employees paychecks?

if you have, you’ll have more empathy for the merchants whose cute little stores you want to survive and you’ll figure out a way to raise parking revenues less abruptly.

The city of Oakland should be doing regular surveys of the parking vacancy rate. If they’re not doing them, then this Michaan fellow should do a few himself to back up all this talk with some numbers. It’s quite possible the meter rates are too high. If so, let’s see the proof.

in a dream world, we’d have a regional government and it would be able to force all commercial operators to charge for parking. (and residential parking would be “unbundled” and charged for too!) until then, we need to establish good public transit, wide sidewalks and safe street crossings, narrow streets where cars must slow down, and a big campaign including signage and street paint to encourage more bicyles to take full lanes…also political pressure to never approve another suburban-style shopping center or mall… all this must be done FIRST. otherwise, you’re putting most neighborhood commercial areas at a disadvantage by discouraging car drivers.

it sounds weird, but many car drivers DO think 2 bucks an hour for parking, and the occasional risk of accidentally going over time and getting a ticket, make it better to just go somewhere else, even if it’s a few miles away. even though they’ll plop down 4 bucks for an espresso drink.

Cars are the death of the area, not the life. Best to focus on alternatives rather than whining about motorists actually paying a bit more of the costs they inflict for a change.

Why is it every time there is a “protest” it defeats the intended message? If all the shops on Grand/Lakeshore closed there would be no income for them that day. Plus, it would piss off customers. If the new rates actually drove (pun intended) away customers wouldn’t it make things worse? How would Michaan get Trader Joe’s or Walgreens to close?

I want to know how drive-in customers feel about the new rates. Would they be discouraged to shop in town? This would be easy enough to find out, just position survey takers at the pay stations.

btw. I was at a sold out show at the Grand just a few days ago (though I don’t think I’ll be frequenting it now). If anyone’s got a list of businesses supporting this so I can avoid them, I’d appreciate it.

Car-hugging is not revolutionary.

It’s doubly disappointing because Michaan constantly used his marquee to declaim the abuses of Bush, Cheney, etc, when they were in power. Now he’s endorsing backwards parking policy? Free parking is never the turnaround for a city and comparing Lake Merritt/Lakeshore to the mall-ified Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill is bad reasoning.

He should be looking at Pasadena and Redwood City for inspiration. Don Shoup, where are you when we need you?

Michaan’s own website advertises 4 hours of free parking just across the street.
http://www.renaissancerialto.com/masters/grandl~1/GLparking.htm

“It’s an attack on the community.”

Please.

This guy is full of hot air, among other things.

Free parking now! Cheaper, highly subsidized cars (cash for clunkers)! Like the nonsense of Obama Birthers bemoaning the racial and ethnic change in America via Obama-as-synecdoche, these are the last desperate gasps of small c conservatives facing the death pangs of automobility. These claims just do not make sense, and they are desperate as hell.

That says it all right there! It’s not the parking, it’s the crime.