The Downtown Buffalo Edition of "This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things"

The City of Buffalo's been in a decline since not long before I first moved here, and the past 20 years of residency and business have it seen it get only worse.  The tax base is declining; most of the new construction is tax-exempt public, educational or sweetheart-deal tax-abated; and the tallest building in town is now 95 percent empty and in foreclosure, likely to drop a bomb of cheap Class A office space onto the market when the wheels finally stop turning.

Know what other wheels haven't stopped turning? The ones on my car. Because despite all this doom and gloom, someone is coming downtown every weekday morning and filling up the ramps and parking meters with an endless supply of cars, from before 9 to well past 4.  I always have to budget a good extra 15 minutes to either scope out a spot on a street or weave through a ramp past the dozens of reserved spaces to get one close to, if not on, the roof.

I can't explain it. Pundits say there's a surplus of downtown parking compared to need, at least if you figure in lots and spaces on the periphery of the downtown core. Yes, a lot of it is short-termers coming down for jury duty or real estate closings or whatever- but other upstate cities have those functions downtown as well, and I rarely encounter any problem, except perhaps in a niche time and place (like near the Dino in Rochester right around lunchtime).  

In recent times, what little there is has gotten worse, and you can blame it all on the bail bondsmen:



On an average day outside Buffalo city court there's plenty of traffic.

Both on foot and on wheels.

But, the people who seem to never leave are bail bonds companies.

All day, every day of the week, they are there and they are impossible to miss.

They're mobile billboards with signs plastered on the sides of their vehicles: Amherst Bail Bonds, Buffalo Bail Bonds Agency, Citi-Bail Agency and Cathy Rodriguez Bail Bonds.

They compete against each other and work out of their vehicles, thus taking up public parking spaces outside court. They help defendants get bailed out of jail, if the defendants themselves can't post the bail.

The people involved with these companies used to walk the halls inside city court, until a few years ago, when a couple of bail bonds workers came to blows while fighting over the same potential client.

So now, they work the street -- literally. Bail company employees literally sit outside city court for hours each week day, waiting for work and rarely moving.

And they are here, long after they are supposed to be.

Section 307-58 of the city charter says: "No person shall park a vehicle in a parking meter space for more than one time period lawfully permitted in that parking meter zone."

Ah, but they do. Allegedly, they do fire drills with each others' SUVs, rotating into and out of the same spots over and over.  It's so lucrative, there were at least two or three of them out in front of that building on Thanksgiving morning, when I was puffing along in the final few feet of the Turkey Trot.  And if you try pulling into one of those spaces during their changing of the guard, you get dirty looks and a strong implication that you're going to get keyed, if not worse.

Until today, anyway.  I had 9:15 court down there, and hit the usual row of spots on the side street between the two main court buildings by 8:45. All those spaces, long spoken for- and yet nothing in front of City Court. A veritable parkfest of prime real estate!

Or not:P  The eight or so spaces formerly available in front were now verboten at all times, with "SERVICE VEHICLES ONLY" signs posted, the meter-receipt machine removed, and the SUVs now, of course, clogging up the few available parking spaces on the Eagle Street side of the building.

More and more, I'm reminded of the advice of an old friend when I reported something like our fifth not-our-fault accident in something like four years:

Maybe you should just take the bus.