Yesterday, I added a post to the Winchester Facebook group in preparation for a bid to get the Selectboard to debate the petition. Traditionally, there are a lot of people who are against removing the overnight parking ban. However, this time the responses were more supportive. And even more hopeful: one of the current Selectboard members gave the post a thumbs up.

Here is the post from Facebook:

I just got around to crunching the final numbers for overnight parking tickets this year. The two streets where I live received 35% of all tickets handed out on side streets this winter and 23% of tickets overall, for a total of $2350 in fines…despite the fact that these streets accounted for an estimated 1.4% of vehicles parked overnight this winter.

I don’t know what happened, but something isn’t right. We either need to ticket evenly across the town or not at all. I’m for ending the parking ban, BUT if any of you think its a good idea, then please call up the police department and write to the Selectboard members and let them know that you also want your neighborhood to be ticketed. We wouldn’t want to leave anyone out of the fun, and a significant number of streets in Winchester did not get any tickets this year despite most of the streets in town having parked cars overnight. If you are in doubt as to whether cars park on the street overnight in your neighborhood in the winter, you can use this map: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1AIeNuYGU-6ylDIz-ojHwOnI8wgr9m0o&ll

Now, this post does not mention the petition directly. Instead, it specifically targets the weakest link of the overnight parking ban itself, and that is the unfair enforcement (which cannot and should not be ignored). Hopefully, this important issue will help people in general (and the Selectboard in particular) to understand the need to have a serious discussion about the issues regarding the overnight parking ban itself and what to do about it.

Back in March, the Town Engineer (who sits on the Traffic Board) recommended that I wait until after the Town Meeting in order for the petition to be debated. We are nearly at that point (I think there is another session next week) and then I will check and see if we can get any movement on this Petition from the town.