Check out Detroit's proposed parking meter rates

The City of Birmingham is widely believed to be the most prosperous in Southeast Michigan.

The fee for parking at a meter in Birmingham ranges from fifty cents to $1 per hour. Birmingham also has parking structures, where the first two hours are free before 5 p.m.

The City of Detroit is not the most prosperous in Southeast Michigan.

But that isn’t stopping Detroit’s parking department from proposing an ordinance that would increase the hourly parking rate downtown from $1 to $2 per hour. The department also wants to raise the parking meter rate from $1 to $1.50 per hour for the Midtown and Eastern Market areas. The rate in the neighborhoods would remain $1 an hour.

Hiking parking rates is wrong.

These neighborhoods are finally feeling something of a resurrection. Mayor Duggan wants new business in downtown Detroit and Midtown.

A day in Detroit is expensive as it stands. Increasing the parking rate is premature. It would be best to wait until Detroit businesses have a little bit of a clientele before charging them the most expensive parking rates in the region.

If Detroit’s parking department had a little sense, it would look at cities like Clawson in Oakland County and Plymouth in Wayne County. Both cities have something in common.

Their downtowns are prospering for several reasons, the way Detroit would like to. One of the reasons is that it doesn’t cost anything to park curbside in either city.

That attracts people to come to their cities. I know this sounds simplistic, but apparently this idea hasn’t crossed the minds of the people running Detroit’s parking department.

You can’t generate revenue if people don’t play along and pay the increased rates.

Tickets for parking at Detroit meters that have run out of money are $45 or $10 if you pay the ticket within 48 hours. Isn’t that enough for the time being?

What’s really confusing here is that Detroit’s City Council hasn’t voted on the parking meter increase as of today.

Yet that isn’t stopping the parking department from installing new meters and pay stations. According to The Detroit Free Press, the new meter and pay station installations should be complete by the end of the month.

Isn’t that doing things backward? Who’s paying for the new meters that haven’t yet been voted on?

These are the types of backward decisions that got Detroit into financial trouble in the first place.

The council should consider making meter parking free in Detroit. Detroit should offer a moratorium on parking meter fees until business has picked up in the city. If Clawson and Plymouth offer free parking as an incentive to come to their cities, Detroit should consider it, too.