Reply to Parking no longer free on Saturdays in MoCo lots starting 7/8/23

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The only progressive nature in MoCo is to get progressively worse.[/quote]

You want to be able to store your private car for free on public property? That sounds like socialism.[/quote]
dp.. free?  We already pay a lot in taxes.[/quote]

So you support free buses and Metro? [/quote]
for certain groups, I do, actually.

We already pay taxes on cars, gas.  I'm ok paying a small amount for county parking, but I do think that MoCo likes to tax everything and anything, and also spend on dumb things.[/quote]

Ok, then free parking for certain groups too.

Your car and gas taxes do not come near covering the costs of roads and parking. Most of that comes out of general revenue, which comes from everyone who pays taxes, which is everyone.[/quote]
we also pay property tax. Homeowners and car owners pay more taxes than those who don't own homes or cars.  And that's fine, but it's not like people who drive cars are getting more "free" services than those who don't.[/quote]

Homeowners and car owners also use more services than renters and non-car-owners.

Not to mention the parking fees are really nominal ($2/hour). If you're not going somewhere because you would have to pay $2/hour to park, it's not about the money. I mean, I get it, I also feel emotionally (irrationally) like I shouldn't have to pay for parking, so I generally park at a distance and walk the rest of the way, if possible. Or I go by Metro or bus or bike. The rational reality is that, in lots of places in the county, we're not paying [i]enough[/i] for parking. We should be paying a lot more. [/quote]

NP and obviously this is anecdotal but I will use myself as an example.  My DD loves to play at the play area in the mall in silver spring.  We would go for the play area but then end up shopping at a few stores, grabbing lunch, maybe going to a movie if the weather was bad, farmer’s market, etc.  I’m not going to choose that play area again because I don’t want to pay for parking.  We’ll go to a playground instead.[/quote]

You and your daughter enjoy going to downtown Silver Spring, but if you have to pay [i][u][b]$1 an hour[/b][/u][/i] to store your car for a few hours, you'll stop doing this thing that you and your daughter enjoy.

Okey dokey.[/quote]

Little things can add up to the point where choices have to be made.  Maybe you are fortunate enough that it doesn’t matter to you, but that doesn’t mean it won’t matter to someone else.  $2/week is $100/year. They might rather do something else with that $100, when her daughter could also enjoy playing at the playground for free.  It will actually save them more, because they will no longer be spending money with the merchants there.  The merchants might not appreciate it, but OP and her daughter can have lovely playtimes at the park, and spend their money elsewhere, where they don’t have to pay extra for the privilege.  [/quote]

"We would go for the play area but then end up shopping at a few stores, grabbing lunch, maybe going to a movie if the weather was bad, farmer’s market, etc." but $3 to store your car in a public parking garage for 3 hours will make all the difference in their family budget?

This is not about dollars and cents. This is about a basic belief that car storage should be free - you should never have to pay to store your car.

So if you believe that you should never have to pay to store your car, then ok, arrange your life so that you never have to pay to store your car. There are many different ways to achieve this goal:

1. don't have a car
2. take transit or walk or bike to places where you have to pay to park
3. park your car nearby and then take transit or walk the rest of the way
4. live in destination places (like downtown Silver Spring), so you don't have to [i]go[/i] there because you are already there
5. avoid destination places

But the idea that parking should be free in downtown Bethesda or downtown Silver Spring or downtown Wheaton, because you personally only go to places where parking costs $0.00, and if you have to pay to park, you just won't go? Nope. That's terrible public policy. Bad for the places, bad for the county budget, and a disaster for our local and global environmental future.[/quote]

I am one of the PPs and you seem to have really felt some type of way about my anecdotal statement.  It doesn’t matter what you list, I don’t feel entitled to free parking.  The free parking was what enticed me to Silver Spring.  I will just go elsewhere for those amenities.  And playgrounds.  Some we will walk to, some we will metro to and some we will drive to (gasp).  I don’t live in Moco so if the residents there don’t care if I stop patronizing their businesses, that’s fine with me.[/quote]

+1 MoCo doesn’t have anything that can be elsewhere with free parking.[/quote]

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