Month: December 2012

Who owns the street outside your house, and who gets to park there?

Parking. It’s a dilemma for cities, towns and even hamlets. The more you make accommodations for drivers (that is, most adults) who need to park vehicles, the uglier and less functional you are likely to make your city.

Yes, you can find exceptions: Parking decks lined on all sides with stores or condos or offices. (Want examples? Visit the Gateway area of uptown along West Trade Street across from Johnson & Wales University.) But those projects are notably more expensive than your basic surface lot that slicks a coat of asphalt over the dirt. That’s one reason a large chunk of uptown Charlotte, beyond the main corridors, is a dead-zone of surface parking lots. Fully one fifth of First Ward is covered with surface parking lots. In a city with some 75,000 uptown workers and limited transit service, people are going to drive. Just saying, “Don’t drive,” is not a helpful option.

On-street parking in College Downs will be restricted. Photo: Corbin Peters

As many have noted – with UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup maybe the most prominent among them – free parking isn’t. Wal-Mart may be surrounded by acres of “free” asphalt for you and your Camry, but Wal-Mart has to pay for that land and for the paving and repaving. The parking cost is built in to the price of what you buy there. Even if you don’t shop at Wal-Mart, you pay for their lot, because as a taxpayers you foot the bill for storm drainage systems and anti-pollution measures to accommodate the torrents of rainwater that run off, most of it carrying pollutants.
So on-street parking emerges as one of the most cost-effective and sensible ways to provide parking. The streets are already built and paved, and publicly owned by all of us, and publicly available to all of us. But …

Ever had some dingbat park at the end of your driveway so you can’t back out? Ever had to weave through landscapers’ trucks and massive SUVs parked on both sides of a narrow neighborhood street? On-street parking isn’t always comfortable for everyone.

Now, imagine you live in an established neighborhood right across a busy street from a 26,000-student state university, which charges its students and employees for parking – as it should because, after all, it costs N.C. taxpayers to build those lots and decks. The non-student residents in the College Downs neighborhood, understandably, got fed up with students and others parking all up and down their streets. They asked the city to ban on-street parking. So the city did.

The problem of managing parking raises plenty of questions, and not just near UNC Charlotte. Few of the answers are easy. PlanCharlotte.org writer Corbin Peters examined the College Downs situation in “As the city urbanizes, who gets to use the streets?“

Now imagine, for a minute, what would happen in Manhattan if a group of residents asked the city to ban on-street parking on a street because they didn’t like it. They’d be laughed off the island. But even in other large, parking-stressed cities, odd notions of ownership will arise around streets and parking places. In Boston, some people who have to park on the street will shovel out their cars in winter, and before they drive away, “reserve” their spot with a chair or other place-holder until they return. After all, shoveling out is hard work and why should somebody else benefit from your work?
 But Charlotte is not Manhattan, or Boston. Here, we mostly assume we’ll be able to park easily and for “free.” At least, for now we do. In 20 years, I predict, those assumptions will have changed.

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Region’s planning footprint set to expand

How sane is transportation planning in the Charlotte region? Depends, I guess, on how you define sane. Plenty of sane people take part in the planning, of course.

But the organizing device, the Metropolitan Planning Organization (a.k.a. MPO,) is not configured in any sane way. For instance, the MPO for Charlotte – you know, the city of 750,000 or so in the middle of the huge metro region – does not include Cabarrus, Gaston, Iredell, Lincoln or York counties. It now includes only a portion of Union County and a teeny sliver of Iredell. This Charlotte-area MPO is known as MUMPO – the Mecklenburg-Union Metropolitan Planning Organization.

That’s about to change, bringing a modest improvement. Based on the 2000 Census, the federal rules that define what can/should be in an MPO mean the Charlotte-area MPO must expand. It’s all based on what’s called an “urbanized area,” which is a “metro region” which is not the same as the many, many other “metro regions” you may have heard of, such as the Centralina Council of Governments‘ region, the Charlotte Regional Partnership‘s region, the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute’s region, etc.  (Want to see a mash-up map of all those regions laid atop each other? Try this link.) Note of clarification here, added at 2:44 p.m.: Unlike many metro regions, MUMPO plans ONLY transportation projects. It’s a separate organization from the Council of Governments, which is ostensibly a regional planning group. Sort of. And of course, one of the first things you learn in Planning 101 is that land use planning and transportation planning are, or should be, joined at the hip. Whatever.

So I’m sitting at the policy-wonkish session of the Charlotte City Council’s Transportation and Planning Committee, hearing a report on MPO expansion. Here’s a link to download the proposed new map. Pictured above is a small version of the map.

The good news: Expanding the MPO is much smarter than not doing so. It’s not expanded out to what it should be (for Pete’s sake, why not include Cabarrus and Gaston?) but it’s clearly better. After all, as MPO secretary Robert Cook just told the panel, Marshville is now considered part of the “urbanized area.”  As is all of southern Iredell County, north to north of Interstate 40.

But will the name change?
I’ve proposed MILUMPO although, I admit it, it was sort of tongue-in-cheek. I’ve had fun in the past with the names of all the regional MPOs and RPOs. (Yes, there are rural planning organizations, too.) GUAMPO, RFATS, RRRPO, etc. are just too funny to pass up.

But Robert Cook just said the MUMPO members think they’d rather keep the acronym and come up with new words to match the letters. “Metrolina Unified something or other …” was one name mentioned here.  Council member Patsy Kinsey piped up with, “I hate the word Metrolina.” She is not alone.

There’s a lot of minutiae being discussed, though the details in this sort of thing matter. Do towns under 5,000 population get a vote? Previously they did not. Should the MPO members pay a piece of the local matching money required to get federal funds to help run the MPO? Currently Charlotte pays the whole local match, about $400,000. (Note, as City Council member David Howard has reminded the group several times, the local “match” is not the same as membership fees. Those are paid on a sliding scale based on population.)

And this is a biggie: Should the group continue with its system of weighted voting? Currently there are 38 total votes, with 16 allotted to Charlotte. Other members have one or two votes each. Under the new setup, Charlotte will have 53 percent of the population. Should it get 53 percent of the vote? As is, when the Charlotte representative does not show up the group pretty much lacks a quorum. Currently, the voting is structured so that Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, by themselves, could not carry the day; they need at least one other member for anything to pass.

So one idea is to have two types of votes, one not weighted, for things that are minor and not procedural, and the other for important matters that need weighted votes.  The City Council committee by a show of hands was strongly in favor of weighted voting, all the time.

Update (5:37 p.m.): What happens next? The memorandum of understanding among the various MUMPO members, setting out the number of members, who gets a vote, whether and how votes will be weighted, etc., must be negotiated and approved by MUMPO members. So today’s input from the City Council was not an official vote on anything. Final action on the memorandum of understanding is scheduled for March.