I was not a fan of the City of Raleigh’s move to remove free on-street parking from downtown streets. The move was designed to boost revenue for the parking decks downtown, but now a city report says that parking revenue is down and officials are looking again for ways to boost revenue.

One way being considered is to make the parking decks into paid spaces 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This has drawn the ire of some downtown businesses which depend on convenient parking for their customers.

I’ve considered affordable parking to be a key to Raleigh’s downtown renaissance. Should the city press too hard in its money collection, it risks putting the brakes on downtown redevelopment. I hope officials will instead wait until the economic fortunes improve before making any move to squeeze our more parking revenue.