Editorial — A better reason for putting off the parking-rate increase

EDITORIAL — Kamloops City council’s decision this week to put off an increase in downtown parking fees is a bit of a puzzler.

Granted, nobody’s going to complaint about a decision not to boost a user fee by 25 per cent. It will happen a year later anyway, but it’s the same thing as saving 25 cents for every hour we park for all of 2015. And, in 2017, it will go up again, and again in 2018.

Still, the rationale is a bit thin. The reasoning presented to council was that the transition from parking meters to parking kiosks was slower than anticipated. This included the fact that not all the kiosks were available when they were supposed to be, and that a smartphone parking app was delayed due to technical difficulties.

Neither of those things explains why a parking-rate increase should be put off. The delay in completing installation is neither here nor there, and the phone app is of virtually no consequence — apparently only 50 people or so use it.

Delaying the increase does nothing to solve the problems created by the switch to kiosks — painfully slow processors, an annoyingly involved payment system, awkward and hard-to-read screens and even occasionally crashed servers.

Yet council members continue to defend the decision, and one must wonder if they’re at all in touch with the frustrations of the public. One councillor this week even suggested that printed instructions be pasted to the kiosks, not realizing that such instructions have been on the kiosks from the beginning.

In fairness, the kiosks have their good points, such as the ability to pay on credit and to move from one parking stall to another without paying every time. Whether those conveniences outweigh the problems of the new system is open to debate.

The one-year holiday on a further rate increase (the current rate is already double what it was pre-kiosk) might make downtown shoppers a little more patient with a system they didn’t ask for.

In which case, instead of saying the delay is due to the kiosks being behind schedule, it might be refreshing if City Hall said this instead: “We messed up. It’s our fault. We made a bad decision. It’s too late to do anything about it now but we hope you’ll forgive us and as an apology we’re going to delay the next increase in the parking rates for a year.”