City looks at time limits for disabled parkers

Finally, the answer to why it's so hard to find on-street parking downtown: It's those pesky handicapped people taking up all the spaces! Well, you can bet the city won't let that continue much longer: Today, the parking commission is talking about potenial changes for disabled parkers, including placing a limit on the amount of time they can park at meters. As it stands now, people with handicap tags or license plates may park at any working meter for free for as long as they like, regardless of posted time limits. Could that be causing congestion at downtown meters?

"What we want to do is create more turnover so that everybody has access to that particular parking space because most of the time their [sic] adjacent to particular buildings that are high in traffic, whether it’s for able bodies or disabled bodied citizens," said Lilliana Rambo, Houston Parking Director.

"Disabled bodied?" We hope that was a typo on KHOU's part. Anyway, as you might imagine, Houston's disabled community isn't happy with the proposed time limits. They say many available parking spots aren't close to places they need to go, so the lack of time limits gives them the time to get to and from their destinations. "Until they do more to have accessible parking downtown at least in some correlation to the number of people with disabilities, they shouldn’t do steps to limit where we can park and how long we can park there," Anthony Koosis with the Coalition for Barrier Free Living, said.

Officials say they do plan to create more handicapped parking spaces, but they didn't say when.