It’s possible to be too efficient about punishing parking scofflaws. As the Globe reported Monday, the city of Newton recently bought automatic license-plate recognition systems that allow enforcement officers to detect parking violators while driving down the street. The systems allow nearly automatic ticketing across larger areas of the city, and are likely to generate much more than the $1.8 million that the city now receives from parking fines.
But tougher enforcement will be a failure if it scares customers away from businesses that rely on streetside parking.
Parking meters don’t exist to generate money for municipal coffers. Rather, the basic goal of parking enforcement, especially in commercial centers, is to promote the regular turnover of spaces so that customers at local businesses can easily find a spot. A crackdown is justified if motorists are taking advantage of lax enforcement to park all day for free. But many people overstay their spots for innocent reasons. Appointments run long; lines form at cash registers; coffee and desserts are slow to arrive.
Enforcement doesn’t need to be perfect to discourage the worst abuses, and having a little give in the system is useful. Visitors are less likely to risk a long lunch in Newton when there’s a 95 percent chance of being ticketed the moment a meter expires. Newton is livelier and more attractive than most American suburbs because not all commercial transactions occur in office parks or shopping centers with free parking. The top priority for the parking-enforcement system should be to preserve that vibrancy, not to collect more fines.
