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Parking’s Math
This addresses a weirdly contentious issue in this city: downtown parking.
I found Jack Neely’s [June 24] article on the subject to be neither lengthy nor boring, especially compared to many of your cover articles. Conversely, Low Income Lorraine’s [July 8] argument was rather lengthy and totally absurd. Yes, let’s do the math, shall we?
Mr. or Ms. Lorraine chooses to support downtown redevelopment by lunching there. Fair enough, but to suggest that s(he) can afford to eat out five days per week and drive at least 10 miles to do so, yet cannot afford to pay for parking simply doesn’t add up. Disregarding the “hidden” costs of operating a motor vehicle, the gasoline alone for each round trip must cost at least $1, assuming a high efficiency vehicle. The societal and environmental costs that this driver thrusts on the rest of us are harder to calculate but are nonetheless very real and significant.
I don’t know where this person eats lunch, but my experience is that even a modest lunch downtown costs about $8 with tax and tip. I occasionally eat lunch downtown, and I have never failed to find parking within about two blocks for less than $1. So parking might be as much as 10 percent of the total cost of lunching downtown.
It is interesting to note that Mr. or Ms. Lorraine’s mathematical argument addresses only time, not money. If you have only one hour for lunch, why spend half of it traveling to and from a place to eat? It is also interesting that s(he) still, according to the letter, eats downtown five days per week, give or take. If s(he) “ain’t payin’ to park,” then s(he) must have found a way to park for free and still accomplish a one-hour lunch downtown. I rest my case.
Patrice Cole
Knoxville
Get a Bike
I feel compelled to respond to L.C. Lorraine’s letter to the editor in the in the July 8 issue regarding Knoxville’s parking situation.
Based on a brief�Internet search regarding the average pedestrian walking speed, I have�come to the conclusion that the average person can walk approximately 1/4 of one mile in a five-minute span of time or the length of four football fields.�
A city block in most American cities varies from about 1/20 mile (80 meters) in New York to about 1/16 mile (100 meters) in many midwestern cities to about 1/10 mile (160 meters) in cities of the South and West. I would imagine that the average Knoxville city block would be approximately the distance of three hundred feet or one football field.
All of these calculations reveal that you are a self absorbed, spoiled and lazy individual who views parking as the main problem stunting urban renewal and growth. My guess is that your idea of parking involves a distance of less than 100 feet from your destinations doorstep. For this I have two words for you, “boo hoo.”�
I would imagine that most of the downtown churches, homeless shelters and mission centers have an ample amount of parking spaces. Furthermore, my advice is that you spend your precious lunch break driving to the nearest literacy center, impoverished school or soup kitchen and help other people facing real needs and problems. The same people would view your�meager $27,000 earnings as a small fortune.�
By the way, have you ever stopped to wonder how the employees of your prized eating establishments have been able to survive this parking crisis all these years while probably making much less than you? Get a bike or some roller blades.�Find out about those mysterious forms of transportation called buses.
J.A. Christenson
Memphis
Duke it Out, or...
Having read both the June 24 Snarls (about the Iraq war) and Scott Culver’s response in the July 8 Metro Pulse, I would like to point out that, once again, the two sides of this argument have somehow managed to zip right past each other, without stopping to actually duke it out. I’m really, really tired of people doing this.
McNutt criticized the Bush administration for pre-emptively attacking Iraq, saying that although Rumsfeld seemed assured that the locations of WMD were known, the resulting occupation turned up very little evidence to demonstrate this. Further, McNutt references Sun Tzu to point out that the occupation of Iraq seems very poorly planned, that it (the occupation) ought to have been better planned in advance, and that the end result lacked the elegance and clear-cut moral superiority that McNutt had expected based on the way the occupation had been “advertised.”
Culver argues that a pre-emptive strike made sense because our enemy is not one that can be negotiated with, and references Machiavelli, saying that it was either kill or be killed.
I agree that a pre-emptive strike makes good military sense, but before we can say that our enemy is simply a group of savages bent on our destruction, I think it might be useful to consider the kind of people we are talking about here. When it suited our needs, the United States (no matter who the president was) has supported both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, under the theory that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Obviously, that course of action came back to haunt us. It seems to me that we have demonstrated with our own actions that these are people who can be negotiated with, but whether we want to take that course of action, or whether we want to just bomb the snot out of all of them, is really what this argument is all about. Where I think Scott Culver goes wrong is in assuming that we are dealing only with suicide bombers. No one makes deals with suicide bombers (as Culver rightly points out), but I also don’t think that the suicide bombers are the greatest force to be reckoned with in this equation. I don’t have a fancy foreign name to put to it, but I know someone once said that “the pen is mightier than the sword”; propaganda and publicity are powerful forces, and there is always a third option, despite what Culver would have us believe. It’s just a matter of whether we are willing to take that step or not, whether we are willing to “put up our dukes” and start finding hard answers to hard questions, instead of just zipping past each other.
Preston McCall
Knoxville
July 22, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 30
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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