THE HIGH COST OF FREE PARKING
Shoup, Donald (APA Planners Press; Updated edition, June 21, 2011, ISBN 9781932364965)
When I pulled up outside Avi’s, a man ran out of his apartment to watch me park. He wore a singlet tucked into a pair of yellow slacks. He had his hands up. While I reversed in, he hurled anxious glances back and forth between the front and back of my car.
This makes it harder to park.
Had he kept this up all day? I presume that at a recent point somebody had backed into his car while parking here. Did he now run out every time anyone parked nearby?
When I try to put myself in his shoes, I can’t think of any reason to dash out ten times a day to distract parking vehicles.
The afternoon finds you home tucking your singlet into your yellow pants. Staring out at a section of road of no possible interest, you see a car pull up: the same broad division of automobile that hit your car last week. That makes the eleventh one today.
“For pity’s sake,” you think, “another car! Why do they keep parking in that unoccupied space in front of my car?”
But here imagination fails me. Why do you run out again to distract the driver?
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