Here’s a story for you motorcyclists and scooter riders out there (or anyone who needs a reminder that our city government does thoughtful things sometimes). Parking downtown—IS A PAIN IN THE PATOOT. And what makes it a bigger pain for motorcyclists or scooter riders are the paid parking receipts. Car drivers are instructed to buy the receipts and then display them in the curb-side window of their car, but motorcyclists and scooter riders don’t have those and are usually forced to just put them in plain sight on their bikes, where they can be easily stolen. (Sure, you can take a pic of the receipt to prove you bought it and then contest the parking ticket in court… but who wants to go through that hassle?) WELL, GOOD NEWS MOTORCYCLE AND SCOOTER LOVERS. Check out the cool FREE thing that the Portland Bureau of Transportation sent me in the mail yesterday!
It’s a lockable permit sleeve that you can safely attach to your bike! And once again, IT’S FREE. Now I can buy my receipt, slip it into the sleeve, and lock it to my motorcycle without fear of it getting stolen. THANKS, PBOT (and tax payers who most likely foot the bill for this)!
Want one of your own? GET YOURS HERE.
Still have to pay for a full space. In other words, there’s no “moto” rate. Want to put four bikes the same space? Pay four times.
Sorry to be a negative Nancy but isn’t the city of Portland rich enough from accommodating bloodthirsty developers and high-earning tech sectorites to just make parking free? Any anarchist worth their salt is just going to cut the stupid plastic sleeve and steal your parking voucher anyway. As with most of these outdated policies, the real cost is in the paperwork. All those tickets, all those court costs, all those enforcement salaries, all those stupid and thoroughly hackable “lock sleeves” are jacking the taxpayer way worse than a simple parking tax. Make it part of the registration fee. If you have a license plate, it means you paid for the right to park. No more voucher machines to maintain. No more meter maids. No more parking tickets or the insane waste of court resources to process them. Figure out how much it costs to maintain parking and just tax people who park, once a year. After that its first come first served, bitch.