OUR VIEW: Picking our pockets one boot at a time

You’ll hear more about this in Friday’s paper, but in case you weren’t aware, Logan City just raised booting fees from $50 to $70.

Looks like former ASUSU president Quinn Millett’s campaign to stop booting has hit another roadblock.

We understand what the Logan government wants to do. By increasing booting fees, they hope the number of illegally parked cars will magically decrease. Maybe it will, but probably not by much.

Here’s the main flaw in their logic – until booting costs $500 or so, people won’t stop parking where they shouldn’t. The thing is, people aren’t out to get booted; this isn’t something anyone wants.

Our guess is people will continue to be booted at pretty much the same rate as before and here’s why. The reason people get booted is not because they purposely parked there deciding they could afford a $50 parking fee, and now they will stop because they can’t afford the extra $20.

People get booted because they don’t know that the place they are parking boots, they believe that a parking lot with the booting signs doesn’t boot anymore, they need to run into a building for five minutes and don’t think the booting people will come in the five minutes they are inside or any other myriad of reasons. An extra $20 isn’t going to stop the majority of people operating on the above reasons from parking in booting zones. It will just make people angrier about what they feel is an injustice done to them.

If Logan City wants to actually keep the good will of students and stop people from parking in the wrong places instead of using booting as a revenue machine, they should take a closer look at how they are operating and rethink the system to work with people instead of against them.