You WILL Do Business Downtown!

There is a controversy of sorts lately in Gainesville about the plan to eliminate all free public parking in the downtown area. The city government wants visitors to the area to shell out money to use the public parking garages specially built for them. This plan is in addition to decisions made in the past to limit road lanes of the main thoroughfares of University Avenue and Main Street to one going each way, in order to somehow make the area more attractive to potential paying customers of its businesses.

None of these decisions has any impact on what I do, as I have long forgone any hope of successfully going downtown to do business there. For one, there isn't any place I would want to go other than the library's main branch and a couple of coffee shops. And I can get whatever I want from that library by placing a hold online and having it delivered to my nearby, albeit smaller Millhopper branch. As for the coffee, well, one place (Maude's) is easy to get in and out of with a private parking lot, but their fare is overpriced and I resent the snooty unfriendliness I have repeatedly encountered behind the counter. The Starbucks across the street from it is O.K., I suppose, assuming I can find a parking spot (which I hardly ever can). But why bother anyway, with all of the Starbucks stores available elsewhere in town. The other businesses downtown tend to gravitate toward highbrow, expensive restaurants and night clubs, neither of which I care much about.

I, personally, am nobody special regarding my business preferences, which is actually the whole point: I think others are like me in that they see very little downtown that would draw them there to spend their money. In other words, regarding the local government's failed efforts to stimulate business by restricting access to traffic and parking: it's the businesses, stupid!

Of course, they could pass a law similar to the new national health care law: an individual mandate decreeing that anyone living in Gainesville spend X amount of dollars annually on its cruddy downtown businesses or face a fine! But, y'know, although I wrote the above suggestion tongue-in-cheek, I wonder whether some of my local politicos might not think it would actually be a good idea. Scary, but it would fit with the mindset behind the restricted traffic lanes and the elimination of free parking...