At RTC, Your Paid Parking Dollar$ At Work

Despite a few small bumps in the road, paid parking at our favorite ersatz downtown "stressful city-like shopping center" appears to be doing just swimmingly, thanks for asking. But now that everyone has learned to stop worrying and love the ParkRTC app and the elite crisis managers have moved on to their next Enron-level PR disaster and all the whining about revenues falling by 40 to 50 percent have died down to a dull roar, where is all that sweeeeeeet parking moneys that were promised to be used to "enhance the RTC experience" going?

If you said nonsensical uncrowded Instagram frames and improving the overall elite vibe, you'd be wrong, silly rabbits! True to their the crisis managers' word, the busy elves at Reston Town Center have been hard at work enhancing the paid parking experience to ensure that it's not only a convenient form of revenue enhancement, but a colorful one to boot! Check out this awesome chart in the garages making it crystal clear exactly how fun and easy it is to have your parking cheerfully validated by various retailers and eateries:

That's a little... overwhelming. Let's take a closer look:

You might think that this is the result of blurry cellular telephone photography, and not because RTC management simply pushed the enlarge button on whatever cheap color copier they had lying around the office to produce an amateurish, difficult to read piece of public signage. You might think.

But we digress. Alls you have to do is park, walk down the stairs to the garage exit and check this helpful chart to confirm that you probably parked in the wrong freaking garage to validate at your midscale chain eatery of choice, giving you the awesome opportunity of reparking your Ford Focus or cursing under your breath as you head off for some midscale chain fare. Unless, of course, you had the foresight to have picked the one eatery which hired decent lawyers read its lease:

It might not matter anyway, since some of our favorite retailers are either jumping ship -- or being pushed. Here's what the owner of Red Velvet -- a vocal opponent of paid parking -- said he was allegedly told when discussing renewing his lease:

"Basically they told us that for all intents and purposes, they're looking for newer, younger, and hipper brands, and if we wait until the end of the year, they might consider us."

Hipper than a cupcakery? Unless BXP can find a midscale chain eatery that specializes in serving locally grown cage-free salad on top of avocado toast inside poke bowls out of the back of a food truck, we think that's about as hip as Reston gets.

One of Boston Properties' other big promises about paid parking was that it would provide opportunities to enhance the safety of RTC for its visitors customers. And if you thought that was a cynical piece of PR crisis management, you'd just be a hater. Here's the photographic proof that they're taking this promise very seriously:

We feel safer already, the end.