Downtown Bend can be a strong draw for shoppers and diners. The hefty qualifier is the occasional pain of being greeted upon return to your vehicle by a ticket tucked under a wiper.

Parking can be much simpler at the Old Mill District and elsewhere in town. The city needs to ensure the hassles of parking downtown don’t drive people away. The rules should be less of a guessing game.

The city sets those rules. Most parking is OK downtown for two hours. Then a ticket arrives with an efficiency that should spread to everything government does, though without the accompanying fine.

A second feature of downtown parking is more about how people park. That kicked up a ruckus last year and continues to confuse.

The city has always been on the lookout for vehicles parked that exceed a space’s width and length, without special authorization. It issues citations to vehicles parked downtown that are hanging out of the stalls and into the flow of traffic. But the city’s enforcement focus had traditionally been on more blatantly oversized vehicles, such as motor homes.

Last summer, the city cracked down harder than it had in the past, citing community feedback calling for stricter enforcement derived from a parking study. It began a new policy of issuing warnings and some tickets to people that extended a bit past the edge of a space. People who had been parking their pickup or Subaru Outback with trailer hitch bike rack started getting citations when they had not had an issue before.

“The stricter enforcement missed the mark, so we rescinded the policy that gave specific rules on how to enforce. And went back to the more general enforcement,” Carolyn Eagan, the city’s economic development director, explained in an email. “We received a lot of complaints from the public when we stopped that stricter enforcement.”

The city is never going to make everybody happy with its parking rules. But it could make people happier if it makes more of an effort to get the word out about the city’s policy.

Councilor Sally Russell proposed last year that the city paint lines on the end of the diagonal spaces downtown, allowing people to see clearly when their vehicles don’t fit. It was a good idea then. And it still is for any city that wants to be clear about what it wants drivers to do.