Okay Manchester, I'm on the case. I've been looking at your downtown parking problem and rolling it over in my head for the past few weeks. I think I've come up with a solution.
You're welcome.
Here's the way I see the situation:
Nobody will do business downtown because it is impossible to find a parking space. All the limited spaces have been taken up by the people who work downtown. If nobody comes downtown to do business there, eventually the businesses will fail. That will mean that people will lose their jobs, thus freeing up valuable parking spaces. Unfortunately, by that time, there will be no reason for anyone to come downtown in the first place, so the point is pretty moot. The people who live downtown can't get around without a car because their essential services are located on the edge of the city. Supermarkets, for example, need large amounts of parking and we've already established that there isn't any of that downtown. If we build more car infrastructure - wider streets and more parking lots - downtown ceases to be a downtown and evolves into a strip mall with all the warmth and beauty of tghe Miss Bulgaria Contest's Miss Congeniality. We've already got enough of that in this city, thank you very much.
So, what we need, in short, is some creative solution that will add additional parking to the downtown area. It should be visually appealing and should draw people into the center of the city instead of driving them away. Preferably, it should be interactive in some way, to make drivers actually look forward to coming here.
The answer is Giant Pez Dispensers. Here's how it works:
We build 12-15 giant Pez Dispensers. When nobody is actively parking, the head of the dispenser would rest on the ground in a small, conventional parking lot. Each level of the dispenser would hold two rows of four to six cars each, so that any given car could enter or exit its spot from one direction or the other at any given time. As each level fills up, the head would rise a little higher to reveal another level of parking spaces, then sink back down during slack periods. A fairly simple computer program could keep track of where each car is located, based on the ticket given to the car's owner. Over the course of a business day, you'd see a series of giant cartoon heads bobbing up and down over the city's skyline.
Because of the brilliance and innovation of this plan, there are probably gazillions of grants available to offset the costs of initial construction. The City could pay for the operating expenses by selling licensing fees to various companies for the privilege of having their character's image towering over Manchester's rooftops. Walt Disney could slug it out with the Cartoon Network, to have Mickey Mouse battle with the Powerpuff Girls. Who wouldn't come downtown to see that? Record labels would pay to have their stars represented. Imagine a giant, 70-foot replica of Shakira towering over Elm Street. Aside from the added danger of giant, falling globs of lip-gloss, I'd really look forward to that.
It wouldn't end with commercial sponsorship either. Think about Primary Season. Each presidential candidate would want to get onboard with this idea. Party contributors would demand that some of their money went to sponsoring a giant Pez head in Manchester. Parkers would naturally tend to park in the head of the candidate they support, so there would be more action on the heads of the most popular candidates. Pretty soon, this would become a nationally recognized index of a candidate's viability:
Peter Jennings: "Does Al Sharpton really stand a chance in New Hampshire, Bob?"
Reporter in the field, standing in front of a Manchester parking garage: "Well, Peter, as you know, the pundits have considered Sharpton an outsider all along and the polls show him twelve points behind, but here in Manchester, he's got a Pez Index of 152! He's not out of the game yet!"
During the political season, local television stations would have sharp graphics showing little Pez dispensers alongside the rain clouds in the sidebar on the morning news. It would enter the popular lexicon: failed candidates would have campaigns that "never got off the ground". (They say that already, but reporters would make little quotation motions with their fingers and smirk as they said it.) Successful candidates or businesses would be said to "have a full cartridge". New businesses that surge up and down in volume as they seek to establish themselves would be referred to as "Pezzing".
