Posts Tagged ‘parking meters’

Mayoral candidate Joe Tuman joined local business owners and residents to voice support for reducing parking meter costs and parking fines in Oakland.

City officials are preparing to transfer Oakland’s parking enforcement unit to the Oakland Police Department. The transfer will allow the parking enforcement staff to be trained to write tickets and accident reports. But the move may create problems for some parking enforcement technicians, critics say, because they will now have to pass a more intensive background check than the one required for their initial hire.

For anybody who drives a car, one Thanksgiving holiday perk, aside from the excess of food, is free time all day in a decent parking space. But this reward also has limits that can lead drivers to pay a heavy price. From this Thursday through Saturday, Thanksgiving Day itself is the only time visitors and residents are allowed to park for free in city-designated spots. The following day, also known as “Black Friday,” is not a parking enforcement holiday. Vehicles parked without meter payment will be ticketed.

Amid calls for civility and compromise, members of the Oakland City Council apologized last night for their handling of unpopular parking hikes and voted to roll back meter hours from 8:00 pm to 6:00 pm.

In a six to one vote, the council passed a rollback proposal from two weeks ago, with the recommendation that the city recoup a reported one million dollars in lost revenues though parking and other endeavors—including a crackdown on the misuse of handicapped parking permits and the sale of new billboard space.

Only nine of 50 local businesses participated in Thursday’s General Strike to protest the hike in parking fees, but some 100 local business owners and residents attended the meeting Thursday night at the Grand Lake Theater and District 2 Councilmember Pat Kernighan said the City Council should meet soon to reconsider the fee hikes. Kernighan…

The City of Oakland has been hard at work installing bike racks this last month in Oakland’s commercial districts, including 40th Street, Piedmont Avenue, College Avenue and the Grand/Lakeshore area. This project started when the city got rid of parking meters and so unintentionally also removed 4,300 on-street bike parking spots. To read more about…