Raise the Hammer

I don't mean to be argumentative (although I am a serial ranter) since I think we all have our goals in the same line. I just wish this could be framed in a more progressive way. When I first heard about the petition, it was with a group of people having dinner and the news came to us conversationally as "there's a petition to fight the hunter bike lanes because of lost parking spaces". I can see that the spirit is not really like that, but it's the reality of how peoples' minds distill these things - including city staff and council. The risk is that bike network implementation gets slowed down... any resident push-back to bike infrastructure is just another excuse for the city to drag its feet. And it seems like the battle is often distilled down to parking vs bike lanes as if you can't have both.

Anyways, on to more ideas... could we ask for more parking on Walnut? People use the street inappropriately now - as a through street (shortcut). More parking spots could serve the businesses and residents in more ways than one - it could act as a traffic calming measure as well as providing parking. And the city seems to react more positively if we ask for parking. It's like they are addicted to creating parking spaces.

We also need a better system to prevent all-day parking at street spots. We have the same problem outside of the bike shop. People feed the meter all day because it's so cheap. Or they sit in their car for an hour, not paying, while waiting for methadone. So of the 27 spots on hunter, how many are available during business hours to customers stopping for 2 hours or less? how many are occupied semi-permanently by commuters, workers or residents who should probably be parking somewhere else?

My personal thought is that Hunter would work best as a calm two way street with parking - and we wouldn't even need dedicated bike lanes at all, as traffic would move at a more reasonable speed. But asking for two way conversions is like poison to the city, and I hate to complain about any bike infrastructure that the city builds as we need as much of it as we can get at the moment.