Although about any change in downtown parking regulations is sure to draw some criticism, Lawrence city commissioners did a good job earlier this month of picking the best changes in parking fees and rejecting a couple of others.

Commissioners approved doubling the fees for downtown meters from 25 cents to 50 cents per hour. They also extended enforcement of the meters an hour to 6 p.m., and raised the fine for overtime parking from $2 to $3. The extended hours will raise a little extra money in the early evening when people start coming downtown for a drink or dinner. Even with the increases, fees and fines for downtown parking are dirt cheap compared to many other cities.

Commissioners rejected, however, two other staff proposals that would have been confusing and frustrating to downtown visitors. One would have reduced the time limit on downtown meters from two hours to 1.5 hours. If you have to wait for a table, an hour and a half isn’t enough time to finish your lunch, let alone stop at a shop on your way back to the car, without making a special trip to feed the meter.

The other rejected proposal would have created four new 15-minute parking meetings in each block of Massachusetts Street. That might be convenient for local people who just wanted to run a quick errand, but it would be confusing for visitors who already have enough trouble figuring out which arrow on the existing parking meters is pointing at their vehicles.

There are, of course, people who claim that the increased fees and fines pose a huge burden that will discourage people from coming downtown. They say people don’t have that much change in their pocket and will just go elsewhere to eat and shop. The prices still are very low, and it’s hard to imagine any shop or restaurant along Massachusetts being unwilling to provide a visitor with change to pay a meter or a fine.

If the city really wanted to get up to date with its technology, it could install a system that would accept credit cards and dispense parking receipts that people could place on their dashboards. In the meantime, some simple change machines might be helpful.

There also is a contingent of people who simply want to do away with parking enforcement downtown. What they fail to realize is that, without any parking limits, most of the best parking spaces downtown would be taken up by residents and workers who could park for hours without penalty. As irritating as some people find meters, the inability to find a parking place downtown is far more irritating and a far greater deterrent to coming downtown to shop and dine.

As has been noted before, downtown parking complaints are a least partially a matter of perception. People complain about walking a block from a parking place to their destination downtown while hardly noticing that they walk at least that far across a big-box parking lot.

The fact that downtown parking issues cause such an outcry in Lawrence is, perhaps, a good sign. If it’s all people have to complain about, things must be going pretty well.