Bend parking is dedicated to your happiness.

OK. The article showed up in the Bulletin about downtown parking. It's mostly about the R2D2 robot they plan to install. It's ridiculous, but seems relatively harmless.

The rest reads a little like an Onion article: 

“The truth — the honest truth — behind what we’re doing with parking downtown is that we want to create parking happiness,” he said. “It’s not about getting more citations. It’s not about revenue. It’s really about, we want to come to a point where we manage parking so well that parking is not your experience that you leave with.”

One thing that won’t change about parking in downtown Bend are the parklets, the dining spaces that occupy parking spots. And while there are complaints about businesses taking up valuable parking spots, the reality is that parklets account for a very small number of spaces, Marx said. They occupy roughly 28 out of 600 spaces downtown, he said."

 

 That where I come in: 

 

"But others, like Duncan McGeary, a local author who owns a bookstore downtown, don’t quite see it that way.

“That’s really misleading. There are not 600 parking spots on the streets,” he said.

And McGeary has seen firsthand how parking has improved, particularly in the garage, save for the large events on peak weekends that block his storefront.

His philosophy: let the traffic flow.

“Everybody downtown is busy,” he said. “So don’t mess with the foot traffic and don’t mess with the car traffic. Let the the traffic flow.”

 

You know, let the spice flow! Anyway, to elaborate on the parking spaces. My guess is that the parking garage, Mirror Pond parking lot, and other lots account for at least half the parking spots downtown, probably more.

That means 28 spaces for parklets is pretty much 10% of available street parking. Whether that is a good number I suppose depends on your perspective. 

Also..."parklets" sound so innocent. So happy!

Oh...wait...