First, happy Thanksgiving!  I’m up in Parts North right now recovering from an oversized holiday feast with the closest thing we have to a Starbucks.  The drive up here is about 25% interstate and about 75% good-ol’ Pennsylvania Back Roads ™; with the leaves being down all over the place, I’m really looking forward to the drive back.  Naturally, tonight I’ll be downtown attempting to burn off at least a token percentage of today’s massive caloric intake.

Second, all my Christmas shopping is done.  To anyone struggling to find a parking space tomorrow at Colonial Park, Capital City, or Harrisburg East, you have my sympathy.  Glad I’m not there.

Third, remember all the “bitching and whining” us bloggers were doing about the downtown parking situation?  It seems like only a few months ago, you couldn’t open up your favorite RSS aggregator without reading at least a half dozen posts on how miserable the parking availability had become.  In reality, the complaining was almost a year and a half ago, having only silenced due to the lack of a resolution.  Well, it seems that the city is finally starting to acknowledge what a colossal screwup downtown Harrisburg parking has become, and how critical it is to the city’s survival.

Discussion of the garage is nothing new.  We’ve all known that it was on the way for a long time now.  Recall that it was the obliteration of State Street parking — which has since been “restored”, even though 50% of the spaces are gone — that got the ball rolling.  The ever-present slow creep of violent crime into our formerly-pristine downtown (a national trend, to be fair), coupled with the fact that most people’s “secret” parking spots have slowly been filled by others, means that parking in a side alley 5 blocks away from your venue of choice is no longer exactly feasible.  Even parking in the River Street Garage (which nobody refers to as such) is difficult, as you face a 45-minute delay exiting between 1am and 3am.  The Walnut Street garage is all that’s left — but for how long?

Fix the downtown parking, or we’re done.  That’s really all there is to it.