Park Place

[August 8th, 2007]

Portland is gaining ground in the endless march toward greater convenience. Soon, you may be able to refill your parking meter with your cell phone. At last!

This week, the City Council is expected to give transportation officials the option to spend up to $365,000 for the technology. The hope is to meet "the growing demand for new customer cell-phone parking payment options." Read: to meet growing demand for something totally obscure.

This could bring the size of the city's two-year-old contract with Cale Parking Systems, which supplies about 200 of those green-painted, solar-powered "SmartMeters" downtown and in the Lloyd District, to $1.95 million—a 23 percent increase.

"The money could easily go elsewhere, instead of [for] something that could be nifty but totally unnecessary," said actress Kristen Martz, 24, after parking in the Pearl.

And in a city that officials like to tout as bike friendly and getting in gear for a carless Peak Oil world, the meter upgrades also represent more than the Portland Office of Transportation wants to spend on bicycle safety improvements—$300,000—in the next fiscal year.

"It's more than we spend on a lot of things," says Commissioner Sam Adams, who oversees the city's Office of Transportation. "This is because parking pays for itself and then some. We use parking revenues to subsidize all sorts of other programs."

True. But the $365,000 cell-phone parking-meter project—and the fact that bike projects are funded with motorists' spare change—shows that however much Portland's leaders want to wean people from their gas-guzzlers, the automobile still rules. And it will continue to rule, as long as parking fees pay for transportation projects.

"As people drive less, you collect fewer revenues," says Roger Geller, the city's bicycle coordinator. "That's part of the reason Commissioner Adams is trying to find more funding for transportation, using different methods."

The federal government is an attractive mark, if not an easy one, to find money. So it's a promising sign that the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, a nonprofit that has successfully lobbied Congress for multimillion-dollar bike projects, is holding its annual conference at Portland State University this week.

But if grants aren't forthcoming, then what will generate revenue? Geller says the U.S. Department of Transportation is looking for a place to test-drive London-style entrance tolls, called "congestion pricing." New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to implement such a system there, but it died at the state level. Portland isn't ready for congestion pricing, Geller says.

"People react to crisis. And we're not in crisis yet," he says. "Do you think it would be feasible to ask people to pay $10 every time they cross the Willamette River? Probably not." Besides, he adds, the public transit network here is still too underdeveloped for people to quit cars en masse.

So, until Oregon's legislative delegation delivers some bike-friendly pork, Portland's transit planners are chained to the parking meters. "It's our only source of discretionary revenues," says Ellis McCoy, Portland's parking czar.

McCoy said the possible pay-by-phone upgrades would add "flexibility," but not necessarily increase revenue. Installing more SmartMeters around the city, however, might. Cale president George Levey boasts that SmartMeters increase a city's parking revenues by up to 60 percent. How? Simple. You can't roll into a parking spot and finish off the unexpired time on a meter.

McCoy, more modestly, attributes a 20 to 30 percent increase in parking revenues between 2002 and 2006 to the SmartMeters, which date back beyond Cale's involvement. (There was also that 2005 fee hike from $1 an hour to $1.25 and an extension of enforcement hours from 6 pm to 7 pm.)

Yet the SmartMeter windfall can't last forever. Parking revenues fluctuate with the overall economy. The city expects to take in $13.8 million from meters in the coming year—a less-than-1 percent increase on actual collections in 2006.

It'll take a lot more than that to build the bike-friendly, train-loving Portland city planners say they want. Which is why all wannabe transit revolutionaries should pay attention to upcoming state and federal elections. Portland needs the pork.

See Portlanders' reactions in this video: