Cambridge City Council is proposing a significant change for parking permits that would
- Raise the residential parking permit fee for all residents to $75/year (up from $25).
- Eliminate the current exemption that allows seniors to receive a permit at no cost.
Many seniors are on fixed incomes. Increased cost needs to come from someplace else. When one thing goes up something else, food and healthcare, needs to go down. Yes, some can afford a new fee, but many of us cannot.
Harriet Ahouse / Newport Road, Cambridge
A stronger
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$75 a year for a Cambridge parking permit is still modest, less than nearby cities charge. It reflects the real cost of maintaining our streets. A blanket senior exemption isn’t fair when many non‑drivers already subsidize parking. If affordability is the issue, the city should offer income‑based relief, not free parking for everyone over a certain age. After all, the issue the letter writer raises is really about income, not age
Parking passes are already quite cheap, especially when compared to the average cost of owning a car (~$1000/month). I’m not convinced a $50 per year increase will really hurt seniors if they can already afford car ownership.
You are missing the forest for the trees. Instead of pleading with the city to not charge you extra $4 per month for your car registration, the bigger question to ask the city is why they need $3M+ to run a program that prints out a sticker? What other costs are associated with this program? Car owners already pay an excise tax based on the value of the car.
Even if you do end up saving $4 a month if the car reg cost does not go up, your water bill is going up ~8% and your taxes are going up ~7%. Just to name a few. Does not matter if you rent, because your landlord will do you the favor and abstract this increases in your top line rent. And ofcourse, its the greedy landlord who will be at fault for raising the rent. Unless the city council learns to more with less, the cost of living for the residents will keep on increasing and all the city will do it point figures to everyone except to themselves!
The proposal continues to offer a lower cost option for lower income households, including lower income seniors.
@EastCamb You’re missing an even bigger forest. The parking permit program isn’t some runaway budget. It’s a rounding error next to the actual cost drivers in the city.
The $25 annual permit barely pays for the physical logistics of managing resident-only zones, enforcement coordination, and administrative staff.
Cambridge’s budget is over $800 million. $3 million is less than half a percent. Pretending this is where “waste” lives is like blaming the price of envelopes for a company’s financial trouble.