

Our View: Parking tickets are a good thing

12:47 AM, Mar. 17, 2013  |  Comments
Parking enforcement helps downtown businesses by ensuring turnover.
Parking enforcement helps downtown businesses by ensuring turnover.
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It's never any fun to get a parking ticket. But while it does not feel great at the time, enforcement of parking rules is an important part of keeping downtown areas vibrant. And contrary to what might seem intuitive, building a bunch of new parking places can actually hurt matters.

Look at it this way: The whole reason to have a downtown is that having a relatively densely packed, mixed-use area benefits all sorts of different businesses. Retail stores benefit from being near restaurants, which benefit from being located where workers are taking their lunch breaks, and so on. A good downtown collects a lot of different types of services and activities together in a walkable area.

For a downtown, parking lots are dead zones. They take up a lot of space without "giving back" in the form of significant economic or cultural activity. The more space taken up by parking, the less dense the area becomes. The less dense it is, the more it requires a car to get around in. And if a car is the only way to get around, then even more people will rely on their cars - necessitating more space for parking lots, which starts the cycle over.

Obviously, you need places for people to park downtown. And Wausau has plenty, such as the ramps at Wausau Center Mall and Jefferson Street. The city is even building a new lot north of the Dudley Tower.

But there is no reasonable expectation that customers in the downtown district should be able to park immediately in front of their destination. A short walk is built into a positive downtown experience.

A review by Daily Herald Media recently found that Wausau police issued 9,000 tickets in 2012, most of them at metered stalls downtown.

That's great. If anything, perhaps it should be more.

High turnover in existing parking places allows downtown to accommodate more activity without actually requiring more space for parking garages.

And local businesses benefit from high turnover rates because they benefit from a vibrant downtown. No one benefits if all the metered spots and two-hour parking outside the ramps fill up early in the morning and then don't open up all day long.

Downtown Wausau isn't perfect. Its one-way streets can be confusing to outsiders. There are some empty stores. There is a growing but still small amount of residential space in the neighborhood.

But one thing that is not a problem is downtown parking. There's plenty of it. And despite the grumbling that any of us might do upon finding a ticket on our windshield, strong parking enforcement does not make downtown worse. It makes it better.

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