Are you parking mad!?
Easy as my Sunday morning unfolded, a drive out for a snack seemed like a sensible way to keep the dandy-day momentum going. I knew where I wanted to haul my hunger to, having spotted the red-letter signage of Jacob’s Shawarma, the newest addition to my ’hood’s Middle Eastern gastro-enculturation. The great thing about Ortigas is that we’re doing pretty well, culturally. A gourmet pandesal outpost across a jello shot-serving club, a Euro beer-peddling pub or two, Korean karaoke joints, a wine place by a casino by a Brazilian waxing hub, and Persian eateries aplenty — commercial choice is just as strong as the village voice (gated community central, you might say) over here.
Given its extra-casual atmosphere and lack of one-way streets, what the town I’ve been living in all my life seemed to boast was accessibility. And the fact that, whether it’s a two-hour game at a local billiard hall, The Elbow Room, or a basket of Parmesan-encrusted wings at Buffalo’s on Food Street, you almost always get what you pay for. Well, until that fateful food run last Sunday, when the commercial congeniality I’d always enjoyed in my area had met an automated barricade.
Grand Theft Auto
“Sir, P60, flat rate,” a female parking attendant announced flatly as I drove up by her booth, situated right across the building Jacob’s Shawarma was at the ground level of. “Seryoso ka?” I protested, gaping at the lady like I once did the Thai mama-san who tried to charge me one-night-with-a-hooker’s-worth of baht just “for looking” at her flab-flaunting strippers. But unlike the mama-san, there was no negotiating with this broad. A huge sign stood above her, baring the gross injustice that is the all-day parking fee — and the payment upfront. too, the urgency of which made it seem like I’d come here just to admire the jagged stones that filled the open lot.
I had committed to my craving for grilled meat and squeeze-bottle chili sauce, however, and this being the only public parking lot near Jacob’s (usually, you need to be a resident or whip out an employee ID when accessing basement parking) presented me no choice on the matter. The attendant asked how long I would take after I reasoned that I needed to first hit an ATM up for some cash and then grab a bite at Jacob’s before I could pay her. But she thankfully raised the barricade and the consolation of greasy grub made the drive-by dishonor a little bearable.
Except that the “We’re Open” sign at the entrance of Jacob’s had been hung simply to play with my emotions. Jerking the door handle had prompted the Iranian-looking woman on the other side of the glass pane to mouth the opposite on the joint’s supposed status of operations. Secure Parking, the feudal lord that ran the lot I’d deposited my car in had no sympathy for my cause when I’d returned, dejected and deprived of shaved beef. “Wala talaga kaming grace period,” the attendant (a.k.a. the devil’s handmaiden) said after I pleaded “no pay” for being away only for the duration of a piss break. It was a disgrace to the car-driving public and since then, I have resolved to be the Harvey Milk to all those mother-parking operators trying to milk us of more moolah.
Capitalist Punishment
You don’t have to tell me that, as with lunch, there’s no such thing as free parking (not true, but I’ll give free enterprise that). We’re all used to the P40-P45 wallet siphoning that greets us when we head to our mall of choice — not to mention lunch, a movie, and a stroll around, running up quite a bill and making that parking ticket a golden ticket for the big, bad mall magnates. Or the P30 you’ve got to hand over to one of Makati’s forced-fee enforcers when you parallel park along the city’s streets. But Makati, that’s understandable, being the capital of mobile hassles and all. I’ve had to fork over P80 for parking in a building where I had paid just a little more than that for the ramen I’d gone there for. The reason? Despite giving this building business, it needed validation to prove that I had — apart from already giving it business through its hefty parking fee, of course.
I get the concept of buying into an illusion of security for my hunk of metal. There’s just a point when a parking customer becomes a parking peon, one who has to pay dearly and work at finding a space on a lot that isn’t even paved properly. Or to pay that all-day fee and come back to a car with a smashed window and jacked laptop, just to find a ticket clause that denies responsibility for your loss. At a lot operated by Secure (the same operator that had gypped me and shrugged at many accounts of actual car theft on its premises), it makes you feel a whole lot insecure, doesn’t it?
The gasps we’ve let out upon realizing how much we’ve had to cough up at each exit are manifold. We parkers have been passive for so long, we’ve forgotten how it feels to just drive to our destinations and depart contentedly. This has finally hit me close to home in Ortigas, where the consumer entitlement I’ve always relished stands threatened by tyrannical parking kings. Especially with the significant rise of pay-to-park realms — the “first robotic parking lot” at Silver City, for instance — accompanying the thriving enterprise in my area, new shawarma joints or otherwise. If the Manila Traffic & Parking Bureau’s mission is to “ensure the efficiency of basic services” in pay parking areas, then it needs to make sure unfair parking practitioners are served up some ethics. Paving paradise to put up a parking lot is one thing, but to damn everyone who drives through is a roadblock to one of our most basic freedoms: choice.
