Omnivore - Parking insanity continues to spread

Unless you depend on MARTA, you know that parking in our city has become a nightmare. Creative Loafing has been reporting about it for months. I knew it had reached the point of absurdity when I noticed parking meters had been installed under the Hill Street bridge, near Grady Hospital, where the homeless encamp when the police aren’t herding them elsewhere.

Many meters, in Midtown for example, permit only a two-hour maximum, which is especially ridiculous at night. I’ve had to walk back to meters several times during dinner to deposit more money. And we got a ticket outside Dynamic Dish on Edgewood recently, even though the meter was broken and a uniformed person happily dispensing tickets to car after car told us we wouldn’t get one.

Paul Luna of Lunacy Black Market has been waging war with the city over this for months.

Now, apparently, the mania has extended to the private lots. What Now Atlanta? reports that Buckhead Bottle Bar had to pay $800 to remove boots from employees’ cars on Aug. 21. They were booted by the restaurant’s own valet company...on its own property.

The surreal story is a bit convoluted to retell here, so do check out What Now’s account.

This whole business, by the way, reminds me of the 1980s when I was editor of Creative Loafing. We reported on similar insanity when parking companies, as I recall, were basically paying owners of literally vacant lots to let them erect “no parking” signs near club venues. Then, they’d boot countless cars of people who had been parking in the lots without worry for months. The city put a stop to it. Now, of course, the city is part of the problem.