Truth in Advertising: Parking Tickets to be Renamed “Streetcar Stubs”

Do you park illegally on City streets? Have you received a parking ticket for your transgression? Well, I have good news for you.

The Mayor’s Office, in collaboration with his Department of Public Works, will allow you to take that parking ticket and use it to ride for free on the economic-development engine of the Downtown: The Milwaukee Streetcar!

Oh, happy day! Now you, too, can join residents of the Couture in schlepping it in style from the Lakefront to Milwaukee’s Public Market to the Post Office, and even all the way to Burns Commons…assuming you have the two hours it usually takes for the streetcar to traverse even short distances.

Can’t be bothered to drive or bus into downtown to actually obtain access to the two-mile oval of opulence that is your Milwaukee Streetcar route? That’s O.K.!

For a limited time only, you can donate the funds from your parking ticket to support the ridership of an economically-challenged Couture dweller. Who says there is no such thing as a free ride? You just paid for one!

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Setting levity to one side for a moment, here’s the situation.

The Transportation Fund for the City is in bad shape…we’re talking life-support. It has accumulated a $32.3 million cash debt that it has no prospects for repaying under the current regime. The only hope is either to increase revenue or cut expenses.

Since obtaining efficiencies appears anathema to the Mayor’s team (Charge fares for riding the Streetcar? Too hard!), cutting expenses appears to be off the table for them.

That leaves only the prospect of raising revenue. They have two main strategies here. Charge more for meters, and write more parking tickets.

More fully, downtown meters are going to run to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday by the end of spring, and parking enforcement officers are going to – somehow, someway – write 65,000(!) more tickets next year.

There’s gotta be a better way to climb out of the hole that the Transportation Fund is in. I have suggested sandbagging the Milwaukee Streetcar as a way of saving $4.2 million annually. The Mayor suggests writing more tickets (Where in the City? Great question.) and charging more for the luxury of driving into downtown and parking your car.

This strategy, in my mind, is a ticket to nowhere. It does not address the fundamental flaw in the system, and it fails to cognize the inequality that his approach breeds. When you have poor people in densely-parked areas paying for rich people downtown to have a perk that only they can enjoy – that, my friend, is unfair.

It is high time that we finally reckon with that disparity and Stop the Hop!

N.B.: AI? As if…

Addendum: A 100% very real representation of this situation can be seen here.

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.