Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

This week, Carmel-By-The-Sea is starting a six-month experiment with paid parking. Ten "kiosks," which are essentially fancy parking meters designed to serve an entire block, have been installed along Ocean Avenue to test the viability of implementing paid parking throughout the business district. Carmel has flirted with this idea several times in the recent years, but this is the first time they've hopped into bed with it. The theory justifying paid parking, as I understand it, goes something like this. There are not enough parking spaces downtown to meet demand. Making matters worse, it is believed that downtown employees are parking in on-street spaces, even though they're limited to two hours, taking parking away from customers. It is alleged that employees keep moving their cars to avoid getting tickets. Charging for parking, it is said, will discourage employees from parking on downtown streets and encourage them to park in the free parking spots and lots ...

I find it troubling that nearly all of the candidates for mayor and city council of Carmel are endorsing some form of paid parking. And this time, they're not only talking about putting up meters or ticket kiosks in the business district, but along the beachfront as well. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I can't think of any more effective way for Carmel to drive away local customers than to adopt paid parking! City leaders are attempting to soften the blow by saying that Carmel residents would be exempt; they'd get a special bumper sticker immunizing them from the parking police. They forget, however, that the vast majority of local shoppers live outside the one square mile Carmel city limits. Local shoppers live in a much larger territory stretching from Marina to Big Sur. Those of us who live in this area shop in Carmel because we like to, not because we have to. Is Carmel really prepared to risk losing all of us? Can Carmel's resident-servi...

Less than half a day after I wrote my last entry, praising our Chevrolet Impala, our local dealership, Love Chevrolet, shut down. I am both sad and angry. From what I've gathered from news reports, it wasn't so much a lack of willing buyers as the inability for buyers to obtain credit from financial institutions. Those same financial institutions were given billions in bailout money which was supposed to allow them to keep making loans. Your tax dollars are not at work. I guess I won't get to test drive an HHR anytime soon. This comes on top of losing our Volkswagen and Dodge dealers when the Wester family retired last year. Who will be next?

Whatever you may think about the competency of US automobile executives, please don't tell me their companies are failing because they're putting out bad products. My favorite cars of the last 20 years have all been GM products. Right now I drive a 20 year old Buick. While it is showing inevitable signs of wear and tear, it still gets me where I want to go just fine. Five years ago we bought Mrs. Toy a 2003 Chevy Impala. It is the best car we've ever owned. Prior to that she had a 1995 Mazda 626. The Mazda's transmission failed and had to be replaced before it got to 30,000 miles (still under warranty, thank goodness). We wanted to avoid the next failure and decided to trade it in before it reached 60,000, and thus the Impala came into our lives. The 6-cylinder Impala is roomier, more comfortable, bigger, safer, and more powerful than the 4-cylinder Mazda. But best of all, the Impala actually gets better gas mileage than the Mazda. Our Impala gets 32 MPG on the highw...

Ya gotta love the thought processes of modern conservatives. It wasn't long ago when they were saying that Ford, GM and Chrysler were selling big gas hogging SUVs because that's what people wanted. It fit in so neatly with their confidence in market forces to keep the economy humming along. Their beliefs were accompanied by firm opposition to tougher fuel economy standards, saying it would stifle the free market and force people to drive cars they don't want. Now that the Big Three are failing, largely due to their reliance on SUV sales which went SPLAT on the pavement when gas prices went through the roof, these same conservatives are saying that American automakers were too stupid to realize that people wanted fuel efficient cars. This obvious contradiction has its own internal logic. It allows conservatives to maintain their ideological purity without admitting to any lapses in logic. This tactic will work as long as they can maintain the illusion that they never suppo...