Capital city should revisit this idea

The capital city should consider offering some free parking in the downtown in the days leading up to Christmas. Not only would it be a gesture of generosity by the city, it would give downtown merchants an extra sales pitch in their efforts to attract Christmas shoppers downtown.
The idea was raised recently in a letter to the editor by a Stratford resident who suggested shoppers might be able to spend more time shopping if they didn't have to worry about keeping an eye on the parking meter. Why not, he questioned, give people a break two weeks before Christmas and let them park for free?
It seems like a good idea. And it's actually one council tried before, but abandoned. About a decade ago, council experimented with offering a couple of hours of free parking in the afternoon during December. This was expanded in the next two years, allowing free parking from 12 noon on. But as popular as this proved to be for the merchants, council saw a drop in meter revenue and concluded that many of those benefiting from the free-parking privilege were those working downtown. Council discontinued the practice.
Council should revisit that experiment and figure out what worked and what didn't and consider offering it again.
The downtown continues to struggle to attract shoppers, but certainly the widely held perception that it's difficult to park doesn't help its cause. Declaring free parking for, say, the last two weeks before Christmas would suspend that particular problem for both merchants and shoppers.