OPINION: I grew up on this beach and I have a few things to say about the new parking meters
Strand — Opinion
I was born four streets from the sea. I learned to swim in it before I learned to ride a bicycle. My father brought me here on Sunday mornings when the water was still cold and the beach was empty and there was nowhere else either of us needed to be. He never paid for that. Neither did I, for the fifty-three years that followed.
Last Saturday I drove down to Marine Drive, as I have done more times than I could count and I discovered that the municipality has installed parking meters. This is not a small thing and I would like everyone to treat it as not a small thing. The sea has been free my entire life. It was free before I was born. It was free during the years when nothing else was, when the cost of everything else kept climbing and the one reliable and democratic fact about living near the ocean was that you could go and stand in front of it without paying anyone for the privilege.
I understand the arguments. I have heard them. Revenue generation, infrastructure maintenance, traffic management and something about an app that I am told makes it simple, though I will say plainly that I have no intention of downloading it. What I cannot accept is the philosophical position that the municipality has arrived at, which is that a body of water that has existed for longer than human memory, that does not belong to anyone, that asks nothing of you and gives everything, should now require a transaction before you are permitted to look at it from a parking bay.
It is, philosophically speaking, a new low. I am seventy-one years old. I have seen a few.
A retired boilermaker, Strand
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