Traverse City, like most popular cities, enforces a pay-to-park policy downtown. This prevents people from leaving their cars in a parking spot for too long, making space for others coming in. This is especially helpful during the summer time, because of all the events like Cherry Fest happening. Since the city gets especially busy during this time, people have a hard time finding a parking spot, but this policy makes it a little easier. Although having a good impact on the summer season and tourists, people who work at downtown places have trouble with having to pay this fee as well.
“It really doesn’t make sense for them to have to pay for parking, because they go there to make money, but instead it’s costing them money every time they park,” junior and Red Ginger employee Laila Hautala said.
Having to pay money just to park at your job downtown is not a pleasant experience for workers that are actively doing these jobs and supporting the city in doing so, but yet have no solution for this problem in certain jobs.
“We’re going downtown to work there, and we actually have a population that come and support Traverse City, but the fact we have to pay to park and work there and make it a popular town, it just doesn’t really make sense that we have to pay for having to help the city thrive,” junior and Cherry Republic employee Emma Martinez said.
The prices workers have to pay will add up, which makes a need for a solution more prominent.
“It’s about $2 every time, so $2 every time you work,” junior and Red Ginger employee Harper Nelson said.
One thing that could be a possible solution would be to create a workers parking pass that any worker downtown could get access to, and this would help to not only pay for the pass and support the town still in doing so, but allow workers to be able to work without having a fee to worry about.
“I think that [a parking pass] would be a really good idea, because, specifically just for workers, not having a citizen who doesn’t work downtown get one, but as a worker it would be really nice to have one, and having designated parking spaces we can use,” Martinez said.
This could also be an employer problem and not just the city, because employers have options to help this problem like buying out parking spaces for employees, but some places don’t have the option or don’t even try.
“In the first place, the city should not be ticketing people that work downtown, and there should be some sort of system or pass that’s already in place, but because there isn’t, some employers just don’t give their employees a pass to pay for it,” Hautala said.
