Written on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 9:43am by Alan Bedenko | 5 Comments

Dear City of Buffalo

tix.JPG

See that ticket? The new pay & display meters are fantastic, but I’m always left with these little receipts for parking that are somewhat useless after-the-fact. They end up in the trash, and I’m sure many people just litter.

With that in mind, perhaps you could kill two birds with one stone? I know that the city needs all the cash-money it can get, and I’m sure the reduced maintenance of one pay & display machine versus several meter heads equals savings. But couldn’t you pay for the cost of the paper (at a bare minimum) by selling the backs of these receipts to advertisers?

With Buffalo being pretty much a national hotbed of coupon usage, if the backs of these parking receipts contained, for example, a deal for 20% off any iced coffee drink at Spot, or buy-one-get-one lunch at Chef’s, people would use them and be less apt to litter. Win-win – the city gets some ad revenue that pays for the ticket paper, the motorist gets a coupon for some goods or services, and no one adds to paper waste on the street or in landfills with these things.

That’s right. I’m here to help.

Love, BP.

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5 Comments

  1. hank says:
    August 20, 2008 at 10:28 am

    Someones’ brain housing group is working here. Surprised nobody in the much vaunted Brown Administration hadn’t already thought of that. Tops and Wegman’s and others would probably like some space too!

  2. Chris says:
    August 20, 2008 at 11:50 am

    Went to email this post to the City of Buffalo Parking folks, but found they don’t have an email address. Mail only. Internet fail!

  3. peter scott says:
    August 20, 2008 at 1:54 pm

    I spoke with a meter attendant outside my apt. at Elmwood and W. Ferry a few weeks ago…I wanted to know when the meters were coming down in “my” block…he said they weren’t. The city had a grant to install the pay and display meters…and that money is gone now.

    He also said that the meters Buffalo bought are pretty much not made for Buffalo winters…similar meters in Toronto are made from much stronger materials. He mentioned that the mechanism that dispenses the paper freezes in the winter…and they’ve had all sorts of trouble with the machines that have been in place downtown.

  4. Snarky Snarkmore McSnarkamaphone says:
    August 20, 2008 at 2:29 pm

    Of course: everything has to have corporations splattered all over it- just like you want the thruway to be… sigh.

    Capitalism will save humanity!

    Still, I like the less-litter angle (it’s not less “waste,” as the coupons still get tossed, though they could get recycled at minimum). If it was tilted towards or even restricted to “local” vendors (could be linked to dispenser location, time of day, time paid in meter, etc, in some way), and if it made enough money to also give away some space to ReUse, UrbanRoots, name your non-profit/grassroots org, whatever… it could be less hyper-commercial AND revenue-neutralizing or profitable.

    A win-winnER.

  5. Denizen says:
    August 20, 2008 at 3:15 pm

    Pundit should be the city’s new parking czar

 

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