The Salt Line, Vol. 113: The Meter Returns on Its Day Off
Letters this week. The writers are invented. The parking rates, regrettably, are not.
The Lead: the meter returns on its day off
Dear Salt Line, while the Reimagine Palafox crews were at work I parked downtown for free, and somewhere along the way I came to regard it as a birthright, like sweet tea or an opinion about the bridge. My neighbor says the meters are back. Is he right, and do I have to forgive him? — Circling the Block on Baylen
Dear Circling,
He’s right, though the city has a sense of timing. Paid parking returned to downtown Pensacola today, ending the suspension that ran during Reimagine Palafox construction, and today is a Monday, which under the new rules is free. Enforcement has come back on its day off. When it does clock in, it opens with warnings rather than fines, a transition the city calls educational, which is the gentlest word ever posted in front of a ticket.
Now read the rate card, the most candid thing Pensacola has published about itself in some time. Tuesday through Thursday cost a dollar an hour. Friday costs a dollar until 6 p.m. and $1.75 after. Saturday runs $1.75 all day. Sundays, Mondays and federal holidays are free. Strip out the zone numbers and what remains is the city’s appraisal of its own downtown, by the hour: a weekday afternoon is worth a dollar, Friday night and Saturday are worth seventy-five cents more, and Sunday and Monday are worth nothing at all. Other cities pay consultants to learn when their main street is alive. Pensacola put it on a sign.
I’m for it. Free parking was never free; it was paid in laps around the block, and nobody ever got a receipt for those. A Saturday night when a space opens because somebody judged it worth $1.75 beats one where nobody pays and nobody parks. The city softened the return with 53 more free spaces, Chase Street among them. The quiet bargain is the senior pass: unlimited parking in any city-owned space for $10 a month at 65 and older, which may be the most generous rate any government on this coast offers anyone for anything.
Now the part for readers driving in from the beach. City residents can register for $5 a year and park at 75 cents an hour. Everyone else pays full rate, and by the city’s own count everyone else is most of the customers: Escambia County residents and out-of-town visitors account for about 83 percent of downtown parking sessions. Perdido Key is county, not city, and Orange Beach is another state. At the meter, we are the 83 percent. That isn’t a grievance. This coast makes its living off people from somewhere else, and it can hardly object when Pensacola returns the favor by the hour.
The pay stations take cards, coins and bills, and they don’t make change. Use the ParkMobile app, text PARK to 77223, or accept that the machine is keeping the tip. As for your neighbor, forgive him. He brought you the news on the one day it cost you nothing.
High water, in plain English
Dear Salt Line, we drove up from Orange Beach on Sunday and found the south end of Foley underwater. My husband maintains the truck can handle anything. Settle this before he tests it. — Married to a Lift Kit
Dear Married, the truck cannot, and Foley said so plainly. Heavy rain flooded roads across Foley on Sunday, starting on the south end of town; County Road 12 closed from Highway 59 to James Road, and East Michigan Avenue closed too. One vehicle went into deep water downtown, with no injuries reported. Police asked drivers never to drive through water when they can’t see the road surface, and Fire Chief Joseph Darby skipped the customary “abundance of caution” and simply said what worried him: “People really can’t see some of these hazards, so that’s got us worried as it gets dark.” Show your husband that quote. The chief outranks the truck.
The adult edition of the Gulf
Dear Salt Line, it’s October. The water is still warm, the beach is nearly empty, and the unit next door went dark a week ago. Did everyone else get a memo? — Last Towel Standing, Perdido Key
Dear Last Towel, they got a school calendar, which is a memo with a mascot. Most of the families went home in August, and what’s left on the sand now is the grown-up edition of this coast: couples who planned around the crowds, a surf fisherman who’s held the same spot since sunrise, somebody reading an actual book. The flags still go up on both sides of the state line, and on a weekday this month they fly for an audience of roughly you. Hurricane season runs through November, so locals still glance at the tropics with their coffee, the way you keep an eye on a guest who has said goodbye but is still standing in the doorway. Don’t take my word for how quiet it is. The cam is live. Count the chairs.
The Closer
Everything in today’s mail was a question of hours: when a downtown space starts costing money, when a flooded road stops being a road, when a beach goes back to the people who live beside it. Pensacola has posted its hours on a sign. The Gulf keeps hours too and has never once posted them, which is why everyone who lives here checks on it before breakfast.
— Chris
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