What is the city’s policy on parking? Or mass transportation?

Figuring it out can give you a headache.

City officials are spending millions of dollars to “calm traffic,” which means slow it down. This will include converting two one-way streets to two-way traffic, hiring a consultant to design the conversion – for $1 million.

Why not just lower the speed limits?

One excuse for slowing things down is that it will help downtown businesses, somehow.

At the same time the city is quadrupling the price of parking at meters.

This is supposed to be an incentive for people to use the city’s parking garages.

But the cost of parking in the garages is even higher.

Why not just ban on-street parking?

And why is the city spending all this time and money to regulate the speed of auto traffic and providing parking at the same time it is spending millions of dollars for more mass transit?

Mass transit competes with individual auto traffic.

Eye on Jacksonville does not have any traffic engineers on its staff, so we don’t know. That’s why we ask questions.

We would ask city traffic engineers but Mayor Lenny Curry does not allow access to them. He maintains the most opaque policy of any mayor in the city’s history. All information flows through his information gatekeepers. They make a valiant effort but there are too many questions. Each answer begets another question. The back and forth means weeks of email exchanges rather than one 15-minute conversation.

Local media sheepishly allow this kind of thing.

So, we wonder aloud.