Photo by Wayan Vota.

This afternoon, Greater Greater Wife and I parked at a metered space downtown to eat at an outdoor sidewalk cafe. I put a few quarters in the meter, which was about 10 feet from the cafe. When we finished eating, the meter wasn’t yet blinking “expired.” I turned around to say goodbye to her, walked over to the car, checked my email for no more than a minute, and then when I looked up, a DC parking enforcement officer was putting a ticket on my windshield.

There’s definitely an initial rush of frustration and even anger upon getting a parking ticket, especially when you were about five feet from the car at the time. It would have been nice if the parking enforcer had even acknowledged my presence instead of walking away without a word. However, I’m not going to whine about parking officers trying to “pick your pocket.” My car was, indeed, not moving and sitting in a space at a moment when the meter was showing zero time. If you don’t want to get a ticket, be more careful not to break the law (or be on the lookout for enforcement officers).

We do need one parking improvement mostly unrelated to my experience: pay by phone. 7 minutes per quarter feels like a ridiculously small amount of time. However, two dollars for an hour, while not cheap, doesn’t feel nearly so bad. Plus, not everyone has eight or sixteen quarters lying around, and if you do, they run out fast after parking a few times. I parked on Mass. Ave near Union Station recently, and had to go into a nearby bank to get rolls of quarters to feed the meter. Once I’d put in the maximum two hours, nearly half (to be precise, 40%) of the roll of quarters was gone in one swoop.

Meanwhile, I think nothing of spending $2 for a Metro ride to, say, Rockville. I pass the SmarTrip over the sensor and that’s it. A phone system would considerably alleviate the perceived pain of parking meters. If I could just use a credit card or even pay by text message, it would be similarly painless. DDOT is supposedly planning to pilot a pay-by-phone system in Dupont Circle. Let’s do it!

If you’re curious why I have been parking so much, it’s because Greater Greater Wife is dealing with a knee injury that restricts walking. This is a good example of why we need performance parking: people who can’t take transit for reasons of physical impairment, whether temporary or permanent, need to have spaces to park. It hasn’t been hard to find spaces since DC raised the rates to $2 an hour, but we simply can’t go to many neighborhoods on the weekends because all the spaces are full, or pay $15 for a quick one-hour lunch in Woodley Park, as we had to recently. That’s almost as expensive as a ticket.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.