From the Intellenger Journal/Lancaster New Era, “Saturday meters: To pay or not?”:
“Matt Kim sees it every Saturday. His customers drive slowly past his dry cleaning shop at West Orange and North Prince streets, looking for parking spaces. They drive around the block. Then they shake their heads and drive away.
“’I lost a lot of customers. I don’t see them anymore,’ said Kim, who operates Kim’s Custom Cleaners…”
“Now, Smithgall’s successor, Mayor Rick Gray, and other city officials are considering reinstituting Saturday parking tickets or changing the law to make free weekend parking permanent.”
The problem that Kim’s Dry Cleaning at Prince and Orange is experiencing is simple to correct. Take out the meters and put up a sign stating: “10 minute limit, Monday thru Saturday.”
Originally, the purpose of parking meters was to discourage all day parking that made it difficult for customers to find spaces.
But over the years the City decided that meters should be revenue producing, and the latest increase from four to five quarters per hour has become expensive and, worse yet, inconvenient. How many quarters does a customer have to keep in the car in order to shop downtown? Given the cost and inconvenience, there is little wonder that many will choose to go elsewhere.
In Wilkes-Barre a quarter purchases 30 minutes, as compared to 12 minutes in Lancaster.
We urge the City to reduce costs to a quarter for half an hour and return to charging for Saturday. The stores would be better off paying some sort of special tax to make up for any revenue loss than have their customers run off.
