Teeny, tiny cars

I read today in the newspaper that downtown Calgary is switching to an electronic pay system for parking downtown.

The rationale behind pulling out parking meters in favor of this new system is that people aren't constrained by where the meters are actually located. Rather, if you can find the space, you've got it. This idea is not new. One of my students proposed this revamp to parking in Boston several years ago. (Of course in Boston, this strategy is already employed in practice where you frequently see three cars occupying the space allocated to two meters.)

The theory is that you can fit more cars into the same space. Preliminary results here bear out the theory, though of course once we get several feet of snow, that might change.

Driving a car that requires less than 3m of parking space, means that if I can squeeze in, it's mine! Since I take up less than half the room of a halfton truck and many SUVs, that means I've got more options for parking than I ever did before. The university has switched to a similar park-if-you-can-fit-in strategy at some of its meters, which I discovered this morning on the monthly research run to the library.

There's also a rumor, not in the article I've linked to, but in the paper version of the paper that *certain* smaller vehicles and motorcycles will also recieve a 25% discount on parking when they register with the system. Double bonus!