To the Editor:

Being a merchant is difficult. Being a merchant in Princeton is extra difficult. Town Council and the mayor’s office can’t possibly spend any time in town. The new parking debacle is an affront to our merchants and citizens. It’s frightening that our leadership made significant investments in parking studies, focus groups and questionnaires and then proceeded with the poorest implementation that I could imagine. We have a different parking system, not a state-of-the-art parking system. Let me count the ways:

• We lost the grace period.
• Rates increased significantly, now a cup of coffee is a dollar more — 30 minute meters — 27 minutes for a dollar — no grace period, so you put more in.
• You can’t get unused time back like you could with the old parking card.
• There is a 35-cent courtesy charge to use the app and it doesn’t work for less that $1.
• We lost two parking spaces at every crosswalk.
• We lost about 25 parking spaces to new loading zones.
• Trucks still block a traffic lane or park in metered spots, exacerbating the loss of paid parking spaces.
• The parking app is different than the one at the Dinky and almost everywhere else from here to Philadelphia.

Wake up, it’s not a success, it’s a failure. Talk to us please.

 Lou Valente

Hunter Road