Great Day for a Wine Festival
Today Rockville Town Square was a wonderful place to explore Maryland’s wineries and Rockville’s fine wine stores. It was the fourth annual “Uncorked,” a music and wine festival downtown featuring nine wineries and four wine retailers, along with cooking demonstrations, several bands, and a couple food and plant vendors. The beautiful weather attracted a large, diverse, and happy crowd. All the booths were crowded with tasters pushing forth their wine glasses to sample a broad selection of wines. Usually you were able to get a taste within a few minutes of waiting, however, some visitors treated the booths like bars and just hung out asking for drink after drink (come on, everyone, there are thousands of people at this event–“pour, drink, leave”). Usually, the servers would notice the crowd, ignore the slugs, and reach out to offer tastes to others who were waiting but I was absolutely miffed at the dazed servers at Jackie’s Wine Club, who just kept serving the same few people at the front. Fortunately, I could easily move on to the next booth.
There was something for everyone at this festival. Maryland has a reputation for producing sweet fruit-flavored wines and you could find some unusual ones, including mango, watermelon, green apple, and kiwi pear at Solomon Island. They’re too sweet for me, so I was focused on the traditional varietals such as reislings and chardonnays offered by Boordy, Frederick Cellars, Running Hare, and Elk Run. All the wineries also sold wine so you could pick up something that you’d have to drive out of the county to find and Terrapin Station Winery was the only one offered boxed wines–in an attractive modernist 1.5-liter square box. Although Montgomery County is the dominant wine dealer in the area (why is the government involved in selling liquor?), they weren’t present but other specialized stores were, including Gilly’s and the Bottle Shop (both are on the fringes of Rockville but I’m glad to have them in town).
Thanks to the City of Rockville for producing this fun event for adults!
Free Parking in Town Square: A New York Perspective
Town Square parking garage
In case you didn’t catch the August 14 edition of the New York Times, it includes an economic evaluation on parking which might bring a different perspective on our perennial debate on Town Center parking. In “Free Parking Comes at a Price,” Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, suggests that while many people see a free parking space as an entitlement, it’s actually a subsidy that wastes space and money:
Many suburbanites take free parking for granted, whether it’s in the lot of a big-box store or at home in the driveway. Yet the presence of so many parking spaces is an artifact of regulation and serves as a powerful subsidy to cars and car trips. Legally mandated parking lowers the market price of parking spaces, often to zero. Zoning and development restrictions often require a large number of parking spaces attached to a store or a smaller number of spaces attached to a house or apartment block.
If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price — or a higher one than it does now — and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.
He goes on to note that a parking space may cost more than the vehicle that’s parked in it, especially when you consider a car’s rapid depreciation. So I decided to do some quick calculations based on our situation for the three city parking garages in the Town Center based on the City’s FY2011 budget: Continue reading →
Max for Rockville 