From what I can tell, visitors’ permits aren’t issued there. They are theoretically available (for a price), but nobody I know there has been able to get the bureaucracy to actually come up with one, in years of trying.

So I’m forced to stay in the suburbs, not in the city proper — /on the weekends/.

A Brooklyn permit system has to be both intelligently designed and well-implemented, or else it’ll fail; and we only get one shot, since (as everyone here knows) Americans don’t ever repeal laws.

Fancy this:

Eilat now has cell phone parking
Written by Mikhal Ben-Shaprut
Thursday, 27 November 2008

Yes indeed, you can now park your cell phones…errr, your cars using your cellphones, just like in the rest of Israel. Eilat has recently joined the nationwide ‘cellular parking’ system called PaNGo. You can now park your car using the mobile phone number *4500 in most of the local authorities that have paid parking arrangements, including Eilat. The service does not involve a subscription fee and is designed to make it easier on visitors to the city who wish to park in organised car parks by offering a convenient, readily available, and easy parking service using one’s mobile phone. The cost of parking as per the municipal rate is 4 shekels an hour (1 shekel per quarter hour).

Read the rest of the article: http://eilat-today.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=280&Itemid=1

@Mike, any permit parking scheme should should have an accommodation for visitor/short-term parking. Without it, they’d just create the urban equivalent of a gated community.

You also need to be able to buy short-term permits for visitors and for contractors and others doing repairs on your house. This is a standard feature of every permit-parking scheme I have heard of.

Of course, these will all be taken up by residents with illegal out-of-state registrations. But in the long run this will be good, because it will create an incentive to crack down on that travesty.

The advantage of this is you don’t get Balkanized regions, where people never move their cars.

The fee should be used for the city to take back responsibility for sidewalk maintenance in the affected areas (it is city property after all), and provide a less damaging schedule of street repaving and tree trimming. Careful accouting would be required to ensure that areas with permits got an equal share of general funding as other areas (that funding will be going down), plus the fee revenue.

Moreover, I’d expect there would have to be some provisions to allow Generation Greed to benefit at the expense of younger and future generations. We are talking about the state legislature after all.

I suggest a $5-$10 per month fee for everyone with a vehicle licensed and insured in the affected areas on the date of enactment. Future increases would be limited to the rate of inflation. Shared vehicles could be exempt.

For new people, however, the rate could be set higher, depending on supply and demand. And in some areas a “parking shortage” could be declared, meaning no new permits would be issued other than to offset those given up. So no one moving to Park Slope, for example, could have a car. They’d have to get on a waiting list.

State legislators, based on everything else they do, would love the idea that future residents of their communities would be worse off than those who came before. (We wouldn’t have to tell them that they might be different kinds of people who were in fact better off).

This way car-sharing customers would get cheaper cars, and the city would make a little extra cash.

Also makes car sharing even more convenient and makes more efficient use of the on-street space, since one space becomes shared by many instead of used up by just one person or family.