Developing a Parking Plan

To: LTC's Main Street Program's Design page

You've heard it! We've all heard it. "My customers have no place to park." "Some people park downtown all day." "There just is not enough parking downtown." "I could sell-lease more property if there were more parking downtown." "I could sell-lease more property if the city didn't require so much off-street parking." "We can't expext our shoppers, employees, clients, visitors to walk more than a few yards in this weather." "I won't locate my business downtown because there's no parking." "I can never find a parking space on my street because employees park there."

This is from the back cover of the second (and last) paper excerpted on this page. It finishes:

You've heard you have a downtown parking problem. Now you can find out what to do and it won't cost a lot of money. Sound too good to be true? Read on! ....

The first links are to Parking Management: Strategies, Evaluation and Planning, by Todd Litman, Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

Three excerpts appear below:

The introductory Abstract,
One of three examples of parking management programs from the Introduction — this one entitled Downtown — Addressing Parking Problems, and
Developing An Integrated Parking Plan.

Abstract

Parking management refers to various policies and programs that result in more efficient use of parking resources. This report summarizes the book, Parking Management Best Practices (Planners Press, 2006), which describes and evaluates more than two-dozen such strategies. It investigates problems with current parking planning practices, discusses the costs of parking facilities and the savings that can result from improved management, describes specific parking management strategies and how they can be implemented, discusses parking management planning and evaluation, and describes how to develop the optimal parking management program in a particular situation. Cost-effective parking management programs can usually reduce parking requirements by 20-40% compared with conventional planning requirements, providing many economic, social and environmental benefits.

-from the cover (page 1/30 in the Adobe pdf file)

Downtown – Addressing Parking Problems
A growing downtown is experiencing parking problems. Most downtown parking is unpriced, with 2-hour limits for on-street parking. During peak periods 90% of core-area parking spaces are occupied, although there is virtually always parking available a few blocks away, and many of the core spaces are used by commuters or long-term visitors, who moved their vehicles every two hours to avoid citations.

Local businesses asked the city to build a $5 million parking structure, which would either require about $500,000 in annual subsidies or would require user charges. Experience in similar downtowns indicates that if most public parking is unpriced, few motorists will pay for parking so the structure would be underutilized and do little to alleviate parking problems. Local officials decide to first implement a management program, to defer or avoid the need for a parking structure. Parking surveys are performed regularly to track utilization and turnover rates, in order to identify problems. The program’s objectives are to encourage efficient use of parking facilities, insure that parking is convenient for priority uses (deliveries, customers and short errands), and maintain parking utilization at about 85%. It includes the following strategies:

Increase enforcement of regulations, particularly during busy periods, but insure that enforcement is friendly and fair.
Reduce on-street time limits (e.g., 2-hours to 90 minutes) where needed to increase turnover.
Expand core area boundaries to increase the number of spaces managed for short-term use.
Encourage businesses to share parking, so for example, a restaurant allows its parking spaces to be used by an office building during the weekdays in exchange for using the office parking during evenings and weekends.
Encourage use of alternative modes. The city may partner with the downtown business organization to support commute trip reduction programs and downtown shuttle service.
Develop special regulations as needed, such as for disabled access, delivery and loading areas, or to accommodate other particular land uses.
Implement a residential parking permit program if needed to address spillover problems in nearby residential areas, but accommodate non-residential users as much as possible.
Provide signs and maps showing motorists where they may park.
Have an overflow parking plan for occasionally special events that attract large crowds.
Establish high standards for parking facility design, including aesthetic and safety features, to enhance the downtown environment.
Price parking, using convenient pricing methods. Apply the following principles:

Adjust rates as needed to maintain optional utilization (i.e., 85% peak occupancy).
Structure rates to favor short-term uses in core areas and encourage longer-term parkers to shift to other locations.
Provide special rates to serve appropriate uses, such as for evening and weekend events.
Use revenues to improve enforcement, security, facility maintenance, marketing, and mobility management programs that encourage use of alternative modes.

-from page 6 in the printed version (page 7/30 in the Adobe pdf file)

Developing An Integrated Parking Plan
Below are recommendations for integrated parking planning. This should be adjusted to reflect the needs of a particular situation.

Define Scope
Define the geographic scope of analysis, such as the site, street, district/neighborhood and regional scale. It is desirable to plan for a walkable area, such as a business district or neighborhood, since this is the functional scale of parking activities.

Define Problems
Carefully define parking problems. For example, if people complain of inadequate parking it is important to determine where, when and to whom this occurs, and for what types of trips (deliveries, commuting, shoppers, tourists, etc.).

Strategic Planning Context
Parking planning should be coordinated with a community’s overall strategic vision. This helps insure that individual decisions reflect broader community objectives.

Establish Evaluation Framework
Develop a comprehensive evaluation framework. This provides the basic structure for analyzing options, insuring that critical impacts are not overlooked and different situations are evaluated consistently. A framework identifies:

Perspective and scope, the geographic range and time-scale of impacts to consider.
Goals (desired outcomes to be achieved) and objectives (ways to achieve goals).
Evaluation criteria, including costs, benefits and equity impacts to be considered.
Evaluation method, how impacts are to be evaluated, such as benefit/cost analysis.
Performance indicators, practical ways to measure progress toward objectives.
Base Case definition, that is, what would happen without the policy or program.
How results are presented, so results of different evaluations can be compared.

Survey Conditions
Survey parking supply (the number of parking spaces available in an area) and demand (the number of parking spaces occupied during peak periods) in the study area.

Identify and Evaluate Options
Develop a list of potential solutions using ideas from this report and stakeholder ideas. Evaluate each option with respect to evaluation criteria.

Develop An Implementation Plan
Once the components of a parking management plan are selected, the next step is to develop an implementation plan. This may include various phases and contingency-based options. For example, some strategies will be implemented the first year, others within three years, and a third set will only be implemented if necessary, based on performance indicators such as excessive parking congestion or spillover problems.

-from page 25 in the printed version (page 26/30 in the Adobe pdf file)

[There is a fuller explanation of Developing an Integrated Parking Plan in an earlier version of this paper; it can be found on page 43 in the printed version (page 44/61 in the Adobe pdf file)]

The second paper excerpted here — the one whose back cover is pictured at the top of this page — comes from the Oregon Transportation and Growth Management Program, a joint program of the Oregon Department of Transportation and the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development:

Parking Management Made Easy:
A Guide to Taming the Downtown Parking Beast

How to Assess if You Have a Downtown Parking Problem
You can analyze your downtown parking situation—it’s not rocket science, it’s not even traffic engineering. It’s mostly interviewing and counting. However, if you’d like to hire a consultant....[Here the paper outlines things to consider in hiring a consultant to write a parking management study. For an example of a parking management study (done by a firm who also designs and builds parking structures. for a Chicago suburb with a larger downtwon than Logan and significant comuter parking, click here.)]
...But remember, you can do all or part of this study yourself—especially if you have one or two people to help gather information.
Follow the steps in this handbook to achieve:

An understanding of people’s concerns about downtown parking.
A mapped and listed inventory of existing on-street and off-street parking, both public and private.
Parking inventory by block and block face at specific times of day. (A block face is one of the sides of a block. A square block has four block faces. A triangular block has three block faces. Every street has two block faces.)
(Optional) An inventory of how long cars stay in parking spaces. This piece is more difficult without technical assistance.

[The process in seven steps:]

Find out what people (you can call them stakeholders) think is the downtown parking problem.
Define the parking study area.
Count and map the number of parking spaces in the study area.
Gather information about parking as you conduct the inventory.
Determine the times and days when you will check parking use.
Count occupied parking spaces.
Figure out what it all means.

Conclusion
In most cases, communities will find they have adequate downtown parking capacity if they make the best possible use of that parking. That is where parking management programs come in; they are an inexpensive way to add parking opportunities to the downtown.
The first step is gaining a solid understanding of the use of the existing parking stock. This understanding of parking issues will enable a community to better use its available parking for downtown customers clients and workers. This is always a key element in comprehensive and thoughtful downtown revitalization.