THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 15, 1995 TAG: 9504140045
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 211 lines
IT'S A WEEKDAY MORNING and Barry Wilson, the bear of a man who runs the patch of asphalt on Tazewell and Boush streets that functions as a parking lot, is working his angle on the game.
Business folk are paying Wilson three bucks for all-day parking. Wilson and his attendants are taking the cars and putting them, not in the lot, but along Tazewell Street in the public one-hour spaces. By rotating cars on and off the street, and between a second lot down the street, Wilson makes more money.
As angles go, this one is pretty good. Wilson is not only increasing his take by enlarging the effective size of his parking lot. He's also boosting demand for the product he is selling. Drivers looking for an on-street space will be less likely to find one, courtesy of his rotating cars, and more likely to park with Wilson.
But next door, Dumbwaiter owner Sydney Meers is getting steamed. His lunch customers can't find a space because Wilson's cars are there. So Meers has been leaning on the police and the parking monitors to do something about Wilson.
The back and forth between Meers, Wilson, the police and the monitors, are some of the moves made in the competition for parking spaces downtown.
It's a giant game of musical chairs out there, and no one wants to be left circling the blocks when all the seats are taken.
Most of the players are trying to find a way to park all day, legally or otherwise, in the short-term, on-the-street parking spaces. These spaces are supposed to be used just for an hour or two so they can be left open for shoppers and businesses.
But office workers, and parking-business owner Wilson, have found ways to use the spaces all day. Some of the tricks are legal. Some aren't. Some are open to interpretation.
Wilson, for example, is using public spaces for private profit. But opinions differ on the legality of what he's doing. Corporal Robert W. Towe, the parking supervisor downtown, says it's legal ``as long as he does not leave the vehicles over an hour.''
But a city official doubted whether anyone could make money off a public street without a specific agreement with the city, usually known as a franchise. For the last month, city staff involved with parking policy, law and enforcement have been discussing whether to curb Wilson's practices.
Wilson, who says he leases the lot at Tazewell from its adjacent owner, the Union Mission, certainly knows parking. At 37, he's been parking cars for a living since he was 12, he says. He took over the business from his father, Dennis Clark, who ran several lots in this area for 44 years before he died in 1985.
``That's how I learned to drive, parking cars,'' said Wilson, as he stood on the asphalt in his heavy boots and a red flannel shirt. Using his two lots and Tazewell Street, Wilson can accept 150 to 200 cars on a good day.
In his decades of business, Wilson says he's arrived at one fairly certain truth.
``People hate paying for parking. Some people will get a $10 ticket every day before they pay for parking.''
The parking game is played because people are driving 20th century cars in a city designed and laid out in a time before automobiles.
Despite the extensive urban renewal, that's still the case on the streets where people park directly in front of shops.
If a city tears down buildings to create space or erects parking garages, it loses the charm that draws people to the city in the first place.
A twist about on-street parking is that it signals life. Even though you hate having to find a space, you know that where there are cars parked along the street you usually find stores, restaurants and walk-in offices.
Sure, you could park in one of the high-rise garages that litter downtown. But that means not only paying money, it means removing yourself from the street, that ribbon of life.
And in the downtown parking game, that means you lose. The Master
Towe presides over the parking game with a keen eye and squad of ticket writers. He's the parking supervisor downtown, and his staff hands out one version of how you keep score in the parking game: the ticket.
``If you think you have heard it all, tomorrow they will figure out another one,'' Towe says.
In his six years as parking supervisor, Towe has seen the strategies people employ in the parking game. Some of the standard ones are:
Sticking an old ticket in your windshield to make meter monitors believe they have already given you a ticket, or swiping one off a nearby car.
Rolling your car to hide the chalk mark meter monitors put on your tire to time how long it has been there.
Jamming a meter with a bent nickel so you can tell the meter monitor it's broken.
Swapping spaces with an office mate at a pre-arranged time. That way, each of you gets to park for another hour.
All of these strategies, except for swapping spaces, are illegal. In addition, most don't work, Towe said. Meter monitors usually keep track of whom they ticket. And a jammed meter will only allow you to park for an hour free. It will not give you an all-day pass.
The ultimate penalty Towe hands out in the parking game is towing your car. It's the equivalent of going to jail in Monopoly.
On any given day, Towe said, he has 1,000 cars on a computerized list that are ready to be seized. These are cars with three or more unpaid parking tickets. The city seizes about 60 cars a month, Towe said. Owners have to pay all their unpaid parking tickets to get their cars out.
And monitors actively hunt down such cars.
``If a 1992 Chrysler has got nine parking tickets, all within range of one block, we go to that block and look for that car,'' Towe said.
This part of the game is rewarding for the city. Towe supervises nine meter monitors, each of whom hands out up to 1,000 tickets a month. The city expects to take in $1.2 million through parking tickets and late fees this year. Towe estimates that 85 percent of that comes from downtown. Who is really disabled?
To the suit seller, the toy merchant, or any of the other shopkeepers whose stores front directly on Granby, Main or other downtown streets, parking spaces in front of or near their stores are a precious commodity.
Each makes it that much easier for someone to enter their door and exchange cash for merchandise. Keeping those spaces available is why the city has meters or timed parking in the first place.
That's why the average merchant burns upon seeing a seemingly able-bodied person park, hang a plastic handicapped decal from the rear-view mirror, and walk away from the car, no handicap in sight.
The plastic decal or the permanent license plate allowed the holder, until recently, to park all day, free, at any of the metered or timed spaces downtown. Last year, in response to pressure from merchants, the city, with the benefit of state legislation, reduced the time to four hours.
Even with the reduced hours, on an average day more than half the available, on-street parking spaces can be taken up by handicapped parkers.
Towe says just a few months ago he counted 43 cars with handicapped plates or decals on Main Street between St. Paul's Boulevard and Boush Street. That only left seven or eight spaces for non-handicapped parkers, Towe said.
``We have some people who get there at 8 a.m. and park until 5:30 p.m.,'' Towe said. ``It kind of defeats the purpose of having such spaces,'' which is to have them available for the handicapped.
Merchants have similar tales.
``There are 13 parking spaces within sight of my store,'' said Bryan Beecroft of Beecroft & Bull clothing store. ``I`ve seen 11 of them filled with cars with handicapped parking permits.''
``We catch a lot of people downtown abusing the process,'' Towe said, who notes that the plastic handicapped decals have a name and a birth date written on them.
``If the tag says Madeline Smith, and she's 68 years old, and we see a young woman who is 19 get out of the car, we'll stroke them a $50 fine right there,'' Towe said.
With the new four-hour rule, people will often switch their cars at noon, still managing to park free for a whole work day, Towe said.
People abusing the handicapped parking stickers had better keep an eye out for more than meter monitors, Towe said. Office workers have been known to call and turn in colleagues.
The state has tightened access to handicapped license plates and decals. The state now requires doctors to write a letter on official stationary stating someone needs handicapped parking, Towe said. Before, an applicant simply had to turn in a standardized form with a doctor's signature.
Richard DiPeppe, director of community services at the Endependence Center in Norfolk, which works for the rights of disabled people, supports the new restrictions. In addition, DiPeppe said he believes disabled people who work downtown should not use their privileges to park all day at a meter.
Ironically, the Endependence Center was located until the mid-1980s on Plume Street downtown. The center moved out, DiPeppe said, because of parking difficulties. But when located there, DiPeppe said the staff, which was largely disabled, parked in garages, not at the meters. A bigger game board
From 1950s through the early 1970s, the average American drove a car the size of a small country. A slab of metal like a 1961 Impala was not so much parked as moored.
Parking spaces were built accordingly. According to Guzin Akan, transportation engineer with Norfolk, the average American car before 1978 was 20 feet long.
By the late 1980s, the average car length had declined to about 15 feet, Akan says.
But the length of the average parking space has not shrunk. The city still spaces parking meters 20 to 22 feet apart, Akan says.
That's one reason you can sometimes see enough space between two cars parked at meters to fit another car in. To a parking game player, who has been circling a block twice, that's infuriating.
Akin said there has been some study given to a European system of parking meters. In Amsterdam, for example, each city block has one central meter. After parking, you walk to the central meter, put your money in, and the meter spits out a slip showing the time your parking runs out. You walk back to your car, and stick this in your front window.
Another thing whittling away at parking spaces downtown are all the left-turn lanes, sweeping radial curves and other traffic-controlling devices that highway engineers have put in downtown.
For example, on Main Street between Atlantic and Bank streets, all the parking is eliminated because both sides of the street have separate left-turn lanes on each end of the block.
Example two: The southbound lane of Martins Lane entering Main Street has a separate righthand turn lane, even though the rest of the street is one way going the other direction. That means the only traffic that will use this separate turn lane are the cars emerging from the parking garage. And that turn lane takes up several valuable parking spaces.
On Main Street, Akan estimates that 60 percent of the curb frontage is used up by left-turn lanes, corner setbacks and other traffic devices. On-street parking and loading zone spaces share the remaining 40 percent.
Urban planners contend that most of these devices are more appropriate in the suburbs, where the traffic travels at higher speeds, than in a traditional urban city. Manhattan, for example, has few left turn lanes. Instead, left-turns are eliminated by making streets one way. City Planner R. Brian Townsend said the city has not considered making some downtown streets, like Main and Plume, one-way.
Downtown has so many left-turn lanes and high-speed boulevard-style roads, in part, because transportation engineers, rather than planners, often hold sway over how streets are designed, planning officials say.
Unless this changes, that means Norfolk will have to play its parking games on the same old board - a tight one. ILLUSTRATION: Color drawing by Sam Hundley, Staff
Photo by RICHARD L. DUNSTON, Staff
Barry Wilson, proprietor of Wilson's Valet Parking on Bouch Street,
has been parking cars for 35 years.
KEYWORDS: PARKING by CNB