Last week, Christie Thomas posted an image to Facebook taken from the Post Office building of the lines being repainted at the library.  The lines weren’t parallel and changed angles when they got off the concrete onto the brick. The photo caused quite a stir on Facebook, with people laughing at the inability of the workers to paint straight lines.

Here are a few observations: As far as I know, those parking lines have been like that for years, owing to how things evolve when redoing curbs and replacing sections of the parking area.

Let’s go back to 2012, before the parking area and curbs were reworked on both sides of the street. It is a little harder to see on the library side of the street, but if you notice the lines for parking in front of the old Episcopal church, they look like what you’d expect.

Now, let’s jump forward to 2022. There have been some major improvements to the curbs on both sides of the streets, and the parking area between the sidewalk and the brick looks like it has been updated from asphalt to concrete.

Once again, the angle is harder to see on the library side of the street, but on the North side, you can see that the lines on the concrete no longer line up with the old lines on the bricks. Is this because the people who painted them can’t match up lines? Well one could make that assumption, but if you look at the angle of the curb, the lines on the new concrete are designed to line up with the curb which is angled in a way to require an easier to navigate 45 degree turn (red lines) to park instead of the previous 60 degree turn (blue lines).

With the changes to the parking spaces, you can still see the white lines from the old parking spaces. Would it have looked nicer and neater if the old lines were somehow removed from the brick? Probably. Should the city have removed the old lines from the bricks? Probably not.

There are thousands of things the city could be working on at any given time, and not everything has the same value and priority. If the old lines didn’t cause any confusion or safety issues for people parking, then it makes perfect sense to leave it as is and move on to other higher-priority work that represents a better investment of taxpayer dollars.

Each day, hundreds of decisions are made about how much time and work should be invested in a particular aspect of a project before it becomes counterproductive in terms of diminishing returns. Those vestigal lines on the bricks are probably a conscious decision in how your tax dollars were spent that day. Yes, they could have spent extra hours removing the unnecessary faded lines, but someone decided to invest somewhere else instead. If you’ve ever parked in one of these spaces without any trouble, it indicates that their decision was sound.

The lines on the brick may look a bit messy as the paint fades over the years, but they are by-products of healthy evolution as the city changes and adapts and all the individuals working for the city do their best to make good decisions and optimal trade-offs on our behalf.

What about the lines on the library side of the street in Christie Thomas’ photos? For a number of historical reasons, many of which are likely lost to time, the lines on the library side evolved slightly differently. Where the North side of the street left the disconnected old lines on the bricks to fade away, the lines in front of the library were different. When the newly installed concrete was painted sometime between 2017 and 2020, the new line sections appear to have been connected to the old lines on the brick.  They weren’t completely straight, but they were perfectly functional and probably represented someone’s best decision of how to get the parking spaces back up and usable as quickly as possible. The fact that it has been working just fine for most people for quite a few years now shows that the decision wasn’t unreasonable. Sure, it might have looked better to remove all the old lines somehow and start over. Maybe you personally would even prefer that approach, but the extra time spent on that would have come at the expense of something else that was very likely more important.

So, now fast forward to last week. Imagine you get sent out to apply a new coat of paint to the parking lines in front of the library. The existing lines are clearly not perfect, but they have been working just fine for library patrons for the past 5 or 8 years.  What would be the best use of taxpayers’ money?  Should you try to redo each parking slot by stripping off all the paint and redoing them? Or should you just paint what is there and has been working for more than half a decade?

I want to submit that repainting what has been working was not an unreasonable decision.  The city came back later and, likely due to the tempest on Facebook, removed the lines that were on the older part on the bricks.

The purpose of this post is to point out three things. First, the evolution of the things we easily take for granted in our town and county often doesn’t happen in a nice tidy sequence. Over the years things grow in different ways and what might appear baffling can very easily be the result of a series of optimal decisions about how to prioritize the many competing priorities and invest enough time to achieve the goal while trying not to let a job expand in a way that takes resources away from other more pressing needs.

Second, I want to remind everyone that there are real people behind all the work that gets done every day in our community. Even if they are making completely reasonable or even fully optimal choices, it may not look that way without knowing more of the details and history. Even if they make a decision that turns out to need a change, they are still people with real feelings and are likely making the best decisions with the current information and situation they find themselves in.

I’m talking to myself here as much as anyone. In the past, I’ve found it amusing that  when severe weather warnings on Facebook end up getting tagged with “violence.” So when I saw someone had tagged a photograph of parking lines being painted as “harassment,” I commented on the fact with a smiley face. After seeing some of the other things people were saying, I regretted and reverted my comment. I apologize to anyone whose feelings I might have hurt with that.

Finally, I want to say a word to the people who keep our county and city operating by doing everything from fixing fences taken out by drunk drivers to keeping the parking lines visible to keeping the accounts balanced to doing the safety patrols at the lake.  Thank you. I’m sure anything someone thinks you could have done differently gets 100 times more attention than it should, and all your work that everyone depends on each day gets 100 times less thanks than you actually deserve.

Mark Shead

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