Phantom Parking vs. Actual Parking

Though Thanksgiving, and its Black Friday shopping send-off is still a week away, today, in downtown Los Gatos, it sure felt like the holiday shopping spirit was already up and at ‘em. While the sidewalks were only a little busier than usual, the roads were horrible. And even worse, the parking lots were a war zone. Even yesterday, just after lunch, I drove in circles for twenty minutes before finding a green curbed, twenty-minute parking spot at the Post Office. Having grown up in the country, where, obviously, parking is absolutely no problem at all (you just stop the car, turn the motor off and get out of the car. You’re parked, . . . anywhere.) when frustrated, I find it wildly ludicrous not to be able shut off my vehicle when I’ve been trying to do that very thing for more than five or ten minutes but I have to keep the wheels rolling. Just Imagine how well I’d handle the daily commute up to Sunnyvale and back? Luckily, I haven’t had to do that in the last 40 years.

Today after lunch, I had the same problem, where to park? I was getting pretty frustrated, so then, to try to stay calm, I tried to think of some reasonable way to ease this parking mess. The it hit me, phantom parking spaces. Oh, if I could just be a phantom person, in a phantom car and use these phantom parking places that are floating around here, in the downtown of Los Gatos. Things, then, wouldn’t be nearly so bad.

What is a phantom parking space, you ask? A couple of months ago, I asked the question myself. The answer? Well, they are very interesting devices used by the town government to allow businesses to increase how many people a business can service by having them pay for a new parking space for some predetermined number of new people who will need to park. For instance, if you were to add a dozen new seats to your donut shop. The town might say that for every three new seats, one parking space would be needed. Thus, when you expand, you would have to pay for four new parking spaces. So, at the time that you get your permit from the town to expand your business, not only do you pay for the permit, but you pay for the four new parking spaces along with the permit. The thing is, the money you pay for the parking spaces simply goes into the town’s general fund, not some special parking space account which would only be used to provide a bunch of new parking spaces, like in a parking garage or a newly available parcel of land. Historically, these parking place monies are used, for like, new street sweepers or repairs on the town hall or whatever the town’s bucks are used for. The point is, the monies are not used, specifically, for new parking spaces. What do you end up with? Phantom parking spaces! Up there, floating in the sky, somewhere over our heads, are parking spaces that have been . . . 

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