

Apple tries to buy out parking meters. Canada city says, "No!" - thehigherlife
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=0675ec00-b793-4699-b99a-cff97d8feb3b

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comatose_kid
As a Canadian citizen (now living in Silicon Valley), I would not be surprised
that this action was motivated by the threat of a strike from the Ville-Marie
meter-maid union :)

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byosko
Gotta love the meter maids.

And the unions.

Combine them and that's quite the powerful force. _chuckle_

So silly but sad at the same time...

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Agathos
I thought parking meters were there to promote turnover and thus make parking
a little more accessible. Free parking won't do that, and a no parking zone
certainly won't.

In Cambridge, for the same reason, you'll be ticketed if they catch you
feeding the meter instead of moving your car. It doesn't matter that you're
putting up more money.

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Tichy
Everybody assumes automatically Apple is in the right? I wonder, if they
allowed Apple to modify the public space in exchange for money, wouldn't they
have to allow every other business to do something similar, too? Maybe they
were more worried about that scenario.

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anamax
The meter revenue is only part of the story.

The parking fine revenue is probably significantly greater than the fee
revenue. I don't know if that is also true of the fine profit.

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thehigherlife
What bothers me the most is when any organization makes the claim that they
won't change something specifically for the reason that they have never done
it that way before.

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Alex3917
Undoubtedly one of the greatest blog posts of all time:

[http://www.blogmaverick.com/2005/09/13/because-thats-the-
way...](http://www.blogmaverick.com/2005/09/13/because-thats-the-way-we-have-
always-done-it/)

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cstejerean
They said no because Apple didn't bribe the right folks. All they had to do is
give away a couple of iPods and then the city would have agreed to their deal.

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chengmi
$35,000 is a lot of iPods...

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jey
> _Really, if Ville-Marie were in charge of designing computers, the world
> would still be using quill pens._

Sounds about right.

