Does Bend’s government care if it’s hard for you to find a place to park downtown?

The obvious answer is: Yes, city officials do care. They care very much.

They care so much the city has studied downtown parking. And its parking studies and analysts and committees and planning documents push for make parking harder.

If it recently seems like parking downtown got a bit harder, that’s because it did. The city took over four spots for itself.

“They are for new building inspectors and their vehicles, for which we did not have adequate parking,” the city says. So it seized four spots in the city lot at the corner of Franklin Avenue and Wall Street. The signs say:

“CITY VEHICLE PARKING ONLY

ALL HOURS”

Four spots is in one way a drop in the parking bucket. There are more than 5,000 places to park in the greater downtown area, according to a city parking study. But that’s only if you count parking from the river to the Bend Parkway, north to Olney Avenue and south to Idaho Avenue. It means counting spots that aren’t available to the general public. Those four spots do matter. One way to tell they matter is the city felt like it needed to take them for itself.

What message does that send?

The city of Bend is nothing if not preachy about the use of cars. It wants to get people out of them. It encourages people to use transit, bike, walk or find another alternatives.

That comes through loud and clear in city planning documents and in city policies. It’s driven, in part, by state land-use policy that aims to reduce the reliance on the auto. The city may even be moving toward making it even harder to park downtown by charging.

Did the city investigate alternatives before it took more parking for itself? Couldn’t building inspectors use transit, bike, walk or cruise about on Segways or scooters? It seems those alternatives make about as much sense for building inspectors as they do for most other people in Bend.