Parking In $easide Park

I have said a lot of positive things over the years about Seaside Park so I feel its okay to express some negative thoughts about an issue that irks me a bit.
For more than 30 years I have spent a good portion of my down time on the 2nd Avenue beach in the borough and I will be back again this summer but I and many others will not be as happy. In order to bring in additional revenue without hurting the taxpayer Seaside Park has taken away a couple of hundred free parking spaces near the beach and boardwalk in the southern part of the borough. Centralized pay stations have been installed near beach entrances and if you want to park in the spots closest to the beach and boardwalk you will have to pay for them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

My goal has always been to get to the beach early so I could get one of these prime spots as they are obviously the first to fill-up on nice beach days.
However it will now cost me and everyone else $1.50 per hour to park in these spots which previously were free. I fully understand the town council seeking ways to bring in revenue and if I was a taxpayer I might be in favor of the new parking plan. However I think $1.50 per hour is excessive when you consider many of these parking spots are used by local people who are spending a day on the beach. For someone like me it would cost about $10 per day to park and over the course of the summer that will add up. Of course you might say then I should park on the street as those spots are free.
The problem there is that residents occupy many of those spaces and it can be very tight….it’s easy to get boxed in by other cars.

Another way this new parking system is detrimental is that it will be enforced 24 hours a day. So if you want to come over early in the morning to fish, walk or ride your bike you’ll still have to pony up $1.50 per hour for the pleasure. Not that my opinion counts for anything but many of the spaces I am talking about are used by people from the Toms River area and even borough residents themselves who don’t live close to the beach and boardwalk. At the very least they could have made it easier by maybe charging $1.00 an hour beginning at 9am or something like that. However stealing a line from Gordon Gekko in the movie WALL STREET….”greed is good” and Seaside Park’s Parking pay stations are just another example.