Category: on-street parking

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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Parking, planning and bypasses

Today’s post is a grab bag of interesting items for your perusal.

1. Envisioning development, and making planning more accessible to citizens. The Town of Cary has created a Virtual Interactive Planner. Here’s what Dan Matthys, communications and information planner with the town, had to say about why they did it:
Our development process is actually pretty complex, and it involves processes that have a lot of “it depends” and “maybes,” and it wasn’t clear to our citizens when they had a chance to speak and when they didn’t have a chance, how long the process was or what the different steps are to that process. So the mayor asked us to develop something that would be more intuitive, and we decided we needed something fancier than some sort of PowerPoint decision-making tool.
Read more about it, on this planetizen.com story, “Making Planning More Accessible.”
(Hat tip to Planetizen.com for that one.)

2. Parking space census. The City of San Francisco is probably the first in the country to have actually counted ALL its parking spaces. Here’s a Streetsblog.org piece on the effort. The magic number, it appears, is 442,541 spaces, 280,000 of which are on-street spaces. Its part of a federally funded parking management experiment (“SF’s parking experiment to test Shoup’s traffic theories”) in which the city will experiment with dynamic parking demand management, intended to tell people where the parking spaces are at any given moment so they don’t circle and circle, searching. The experiment is funded with a $19.8 million federal congestion mitigation grant.
Parking is a conundrum for most cities. “How we love/hate our parking lots” was my recent op-ed on the topic.

3. USA Today tells us “More cities ban digital billboards.” Among U.S. cities that have banned the billboards: Durham; Knoxville, Tenn.; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Dallas and Fort Worth and Houston, all in Texas.

And Charlotte? It had the chance to ban them several years ago and after a lengthy stakeholder process (see my stakeholder thoughts “Pulling back the stakeholder curtain” here) opted to allow them.

4. The South Tryon Street road diet experiment has begun (“Another road diet, this one for South Tryon”). I know this because it is right in front of The Observer building, and because I have walked to work twice since blogging about it and I can verify that the bollards are up, AND that Hill Street between South Tryon and Church Street is now two-way.

5. Your highway dollars at work. Ground was broken today on the Sanford bypass. Here’s a photo of pols with gold shovels. Sanford is a town of about 27,000 people. The fact that our tax dollars are building it a bypass should raise many, many questions in your mind. The Good Roads State has become the State of Pointless Bypasses.

My theory: No city gets more than one bypass. (Monroe, Shelby et al have failed to control their land use development and have both clogged their bypasses – both of them U.S. 74, as it happens – and in so doing managed to all but gut their downtowns. They aren’t the only towns that have done this, they’re just two I’m familiar with. And both want new, bypass-bypasses.)

Parking gives way to sidewalks (update)

Here’s a city that’s not afraid to try new things. San Francisco is taking away some parking spaces in order to have wider sidewalks. Here’s a link to the full article, courtesy SF.streetsblog.org

Gee. In Charlotte we’re still trying to get the city to allow MORE onstreet parking – as a way to slow traffic and avoid having to build surface lots or decks. They were on the right track but after 9/11 someone deep in the bowels of the CMGC decided Osama was planning to park a bomb-laden truck outside all the local banks, so a lot of the parking vanished. Interestingly, no such protection was afforded to the daily newspaper office (or the weekly ones for that matter) or multiple other businesses uptown.

Update, 5:35 p.m., from Charlotte Department of Transportation’s Jim Kimbler: It turns out Charlotte is doing a small version of what SF is, along Fifth Street between North Tryon and Church streets. Kimbler told me via e-mail that the city is helping the retail property owner at the Ivey’s building, Stefan Latorre, who plans to open the interior restaurant space onto Fifth. It would mean wider sidewalks and removing the on-street parking on that block.

“Both the widened sidewalks and the removal of parking are consistent with the Center City Transportation Street Enhancement Standards,” Kimbler wrote. “We believe this will help activate this street with outdoor dining and more comfortable sidewalk space.”

(And no, Mayor Gavin Newsom is no relation. But at least he spells his name right.)