Showing posts with label Parking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Parking. Show all posts

Saturday, May 30, 2015

Green Cars Get Parking Perks in PTown

"Green" vehicles have a reserved parking space at the beach.
If you drive a car that gets great gas mileage and gives off very low emissions, or a zero-emission hybrid, or a car that uses alternative fuel, the National Park System has a reward for you…
There are 25 parking spaces in the east parking lot at Herring Cove Beach that are reserved for these "green" vehicles, very close to the snack bar, changing rooms and so forth, right near the edge of the beach. These are actually right next to the handicap spaces, which they outnumber two to one.
That's right… This lot has 12 reserved spaces for cars with handicap plates, and 25 reserved for drivers who have gone green. Will this become a trend in all federally operated facilities? Will it help to motivate people to consider the environment when they purchase their next car?
By the way, it takes over 39,000 gallons of water to manufacture a car, so speaking environmentally, you don't want to buy a new car very often. Also, some 1,851 gallons of water are used in refining a single gallon of crude oil. The tons of pollutants and chemicals put into our air by every conventional automobile on the road are not the only issues to consider when driving ourselves around the planet.
I don't know whether green parking spaces should outnumber those reserved for people with disabilities, and perhaps they should. The National Park Service must have studied this idea carefully before launching it. If this will help nudge more people toward adopting a greener way of life, I'm all for it.
Now, if only the NPS would provide the electrical hook-up at these spots so that drivers of electric cars could charge up their vehicles while they're at the beach. You'd think a few solar panels added to the restroom rooftop would do the job.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

PTown's Punctilious Parking Protocol

If you are just lucky enough to find a legal parking space on the street somewhere in Provincetown, pull to the end of the space so someone else can park, too.
If the white car had parked with its rear bumper lined up with the yellow line behind it, and if the car in front of it had pulled up to the edge of the "no parking zone" marked with yellow paint on the curb ahead of it, there would have been room to park another car  between the two of them.
Parking an extra car may not seem like much, but when this waste of a space happens in dozens of spots all over town every day, it adds up to the loss of a tremendous number of very valuable free parking spaces each day. These cars were parked this way for nearly a week, so this neighborhood lost that extra parking space for a considerable time. Please be mindful of others, and be considerate when parking your car. When you park smack in the middle of a parking space meant for more than one car you are wasting parking spaces, and you're blowing your own parking karma.