The steady erosion of true public parking options in Ridgewood will decrease the number of patrons of Ridgewood businesses.
Go to the lot behind Bookends. The majority of the employee only spaces are either empty or filled with non-employee vehicles. Often every single regular parking spot is filled, which pressures people to risk a ticket by parking in the employee only spaces.
The number of designated employee spaces far exceeds the usage by employees. I have seen this on weekdays, evenings, and on weekends. There are routinely more empty employee parking spaces than spaces in use, which is a massive waste given the perennial parking problems in Ridgewood.
Is the real goal of the valet parking in formerly public spaces and the designated employee spaces revue from tickets?
I have already reduced my usage of downtown Ridgewood because of the parking problems. How much money has the Village wasted on parking studies over the past 20 years without ever acting to add to the available parking? The cost of the studies in that time would have paid for an additional parking structure over an existing lot, which would not have required any of the expensive and litigation prone processes of acquiring additional property.
Mismanagement of the parking situation will hurt the businesses the parking should support. Without those businesses and the taxes they pay, the Village budged would be in dire straits indeed.
