Beach Parking Issues.....

So the other day, I believe it was a Monday, my beautiful significant other and I went to brunch. I call her that because she’s more than a girlfriend, but she doesn’t want to get married. Which puts me in a bad light with always having to answer that question.....”are you going to make a honest woman out of her?”. As usual that question comes with the disapproval tone. I always respond with “she’s pretty honest now, or I wouldn’t be with her”. I get a lot of “confused” looks. Nonetheless back to the story.

Then we each ride a motorcycle to the Newport Beach pier. That’s the parking location for one of my favorite places to eat. It’s a dive bar with that whole beach image and feel. The food is good and we usually get good service in the right section. I like it much more than my significant other, there’s that title again.....so it’s a real treat when she agrees to go with me

The thing about the parking at the pier is they have some silly restrictions. I suppose to maximize the

profits on the parking spaces. The parking lot has zones to park in, and all of the parking payments are linked to your license plate not the space your parking in, like a meter system. So if you leave early, then the balance of unused time is just an overpayment. Another restriction is that “Motorcycles park in designated areas only”. Which keeps us from sharing a space between four bikes and further profits the city on parking fees. Ok, I’ll give them that. So there are exactly, four spaces on each side of the parking lot that are “designated” motorcycle parking. For a total of eight parking spaces for presumably eight motorcycles.

You can imagine my surprise when I arrived only to find a car parked in the motorcycle parking spaces. I thought well it must just be someone that dropped something off really quick, like an Uber Eats driver? Luckily there were barely two spaces left so that we could park. We took quite a bit of time actually paying for our own parking. It took us about 20 minutes to just get the app to work right for paying on one bike. In that time, I believe Newport Beach parking control must have gotten

called. Because about 35 minutes later they showed up and ticketed this car. The driver either doesn’t read, doesn’t pay attention or doesn’t care. I have no idea how much these types of tickets are, but they probably aren’t enough to make the driver read, pay attention or even care. However, it is nice to see a response to the problem, no matter how slow it may be (almost an hour). The funny thing is there are lots of other places to park and go to the beach. Several of them are free street parking. Then again, the driver would have to read, pay attention and care....