Have technocrats taken over Carmel city hall?
What's up with Carmel these days? The city council has engaged in some very un-Carmelish behavior of late . About this time last year the council began a six-month experiment with parking meters, devices long considered to be the ultimate insult to the dignity of the village. The council hoped to demonstrate that meters would solve a long-standing problem of too many cars and not enough parking spaces. Parking “kiosks” (single meters designed to serve an entire block) were installed up and down Ocean Avenue to see what would happen. As I expected , locals avoided them by parking on every other street where parking was still free, while tourists, who didn't know any better, paid up. But city officials didn't interpret the results that way. They saw that Ocean Avenue parking spaces opened up more often and, based on that criteria alone, they declared the experiment a success. When almost nobody else agreed with that two-dimensional analysis, the city removed the m...