About Saint Petersburg's Beach Drive

Recently the City of St Petersburg installed parking meters along Beach Drive - ostensibly to prevent employees from taking parking spaces away from customers - but we all know it's to increase revenue to the City.

50 cents an hour, two hour max, with a 2 hour limit. 8 am to 11 pm. 7 days a week! Different blocks have different maximum times and different enforcement hours, but that - which creates lots of confusion - is a topic for another blog!

Poor Publicity when visitors to downtown St Pete don't have change.
Poor Publicity when someone dines at a local restaurant, and sips an after dinner drink or coffee, only to return to a ticket and fine.
Poor Publicity when people come to downtown events like the Saturday Morning Market or today's Taste of Pinellas and come back from a great event to find a ticket and fine.

Why not, if you must have parking meters here, use credit cards with a forgiveness period of 30 minutes, that gets added to your card, none of which requires change?

Punctured Profits when people don't stay for dessert or an additional drink or coffee because the meter's running out.

Punctured Profits when the gelato shop no longer gets morning coffee business because it doesn't make sense to a customer to put in change when all the rest of the spaces are empty.

Punctured Profits when customers go to the competition a block away where there's no charge for street parking.

Why not wait til 10 am to start enforcing a parking fee? You could have the local businesses put hoods over them until 10 am or put up a sign saying, Complimentary til 10 am.