In the wake of the parking meter brouhaha, a lot was learned about some interesting Downtown evening parking behavior. While customers were concerned about paying more than $1 an hour to park, the issue of extending meter hours two hours to 8 p.m. cannot be overlooked.

Gaslamp restaurant employees have been implicated in hogging meter space by swooping in before the posted time expires, leaving their cars in a spot until their shifts end. The space hogging doesn’t sit well with merchants like Bill Keller, who says visitors are quicker to turn spaces over.

“(Restaurant workers) are posing a problem,” says Keller, who runs Le Travel Store. “They park (and stay) in the best spots, sending customers away.”

For Keller, higher parking meter fees — the City Council compromised on a 25 cent boost to $1.25 per hour — simply cause some customers to go to shopping malls with plentiful parking. Others say increasing the hours would discourage patrons who had managed to snag one of the street spaces, rather than paying the $6 to $20 that surface lots are charging.

“Consider that if someone wants to have dinner at, what, seven o’clock? They’ll have to get up in the middle of their meal and put change in their meter,” says Theresa McTighe, executive director of the Gaslamp Quarter Association.

Rich Walker, who manages the busy Dick’s Last Resort, says the focus needs to be on parking availability as a whole, not individual parking patterns. “The parking thing is not about employees so much as it is about customers; if parking is a problem, they aren’t going to come,” Walker says. “That’s not good for the ballpark, that’s not good for Downtown.”

— Sam Schramski