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Raise the height of the Parking Meter
DEAR EDITOR,
The debate, the protests, the familiar organisational dislocation in the City Council –over-ruled by a Town Clerk – all cumulate into a serious joke. As a consequence, in order not to crack up with laughter, one deliberately refrains from being ‘parked’ in the inanity of too many of the contributions – oral and written – on the subject.
So, it is possible to have missed the data analysis that was undertaken in order to inform a decision that the only resolution to Georgetown’s traffic chaos is (irrelevantly) parking, i.e. stopping the traffic. So much of it will have to move around in search of a limited number of meters. There is no way of metering how much movement will be required.
Apparently, the very constricted objective of the Council is to raise sorely needed revenue, which is easily measurable. Same Georgetown, same City. Same total revenue…Locked down. The city is not going to expand in the near future. But the density of traffic will, without any more meters to park by.
So is forcing the city traffic to stand still the substantive answer? Will there be more room for parking, and where?
Surely, the relevant governance officials must realise by now that parking (metered or unmetered) is but a simplistic answer to the more complex problem of city management.
The question must have been asked somewhere, by some inquisitive mind: what are the implications of the future rampant increase in traffic in a city for which no expansion appears to have been planned?
Is there already indication that the obvious lack of space for some time now has been forcing residents and more so businesses to build higher storeys (and with the loudest silence about related rates and taxes)? So why could not parking space be storeyed, as it has been in Port of Spain, Bridgetown and Kingston, for the longest while?
Indeed some decades ago, the Port of Spain authorities required that businesses like supermarkets, restaurants and even banks provide their own parking accommodation.
Of course, it would be reasonable to rebut that for Georgetown ‘it is easier said than done’. But who said it would be easy? Surely, our combined mental energies can cope with much more complex challenges. If not, admit it right now, and decide to find the required technical assistance.
But just now, with the right amount of determination the decision-makers can access a flood of ideas, from citizens (including how to prevent the lowly parking meter from being flooded); and business organisations who would be much affected.
In the same breath, one must wonder how such an insignificant piece of grounded equipment could be the source of such boisterous emissions, as reported by the media.
The cacophonous confusion is not only an embarrassment to the intelligence of those who elected them, but also to the related monitoring agencies. What a portrayal of dysfunctionality – in full view of resident foreign agencies, for example, and certainly, of regional counterparts.
As the oldest municipality in our local government history, its mal-performance is hardly a model for more recently constituted councils. The concern is not about idle talk, but for a comprehensively broken organisational system.
A critical question to be examined, therefore, is whether there could ever be the efficient management structure any capital city deserves, by persisting with an elective process that will, more than likely, produce but marginally better actors – at an ill-affordable cost.
It is time we challenge the past by addressing the future (of oil and gas).
So here is an invitation to discourse on the replacement of this defective governance structure with a body of relevant professional decision-makers – whose performance might well rise to the level of a storeyed parking lot.
E.B. John
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