Prediction: Jacksonville City Council will not ban backing into your driveway

One of the best pieces of clickbait all day  Wednesday in Jacksonville was the one about a proposal in front of city council to ban people from parking “backed in” to their driveways.

WJXT and The Florida Times-Union both had their takes on it. And the Facebook posts for both blew up with righteous indignation.

If you’d only read the articles, you would think that this was a consensus position in favor of that.

You wouldn’t know the real deal, which is that pretty much everyone on the city council, except bill sponsor Warren Jones and Councilwoman Denise Lee, voiced objections.

Both Jones and Lee are off of council before the next meeting. Both of them, also, have had more tenure on council than anyone else, which necessarily gives them an expansionist sense of what city government can do.

The measure is intended to address blight: basically, abandoned cars, used as hideaways for drugs, as Jones put it.

The problem? Most neighborhoods don’t have such issues. My neighborhood, in which I back my car into the driveway so I am not forced to back out onto a major road, is not a blight zone.

Police and firefighters tend to back into their driveways, and they don’t have blight-mobiles, as one council member brought up.

Likewise, what happens if a “nice car,” such as Bill Gulliford‘s antique ride, is backed into the driveway, with a cover on it to obscure the license plate?

Is that blight?

The majority of council members coming in as part of the July class are new. They won’t be thinking about measures like this. They will, by and large, be struggling to learn very quickly about the new budget and how to fulfill their campaign promises.

One of the challenges of consolidated government is that one-size-fits-all solutions don’t always work. Jacksonville has a lot of socioeconomic diversity, and as the comment threads for both the stories referenced above suggest, this solution to the blight problem creates, as Bill Bishop said, “unintended consequences.”

Breaking news: This ain’t happening.