We’ll start off this week with a viral thread about parking minimums from Parking Reform Network member Luke Klipp, there’s a lot of great discussion, so we encourage you to click through into the replies.
Last week featured a story about Oregon’s statewide parking minimum rules, here’s a supplemental thread from the author (and PRN member) Michael Andersen.
SPUR follows up their “True Cost of Residential Parking” webinar with a deep dive into the legality of charging market rates for residential parking in California, and what California cities could do with the revenue.
“American’s like free parking. They don’t realize it doesn’t exist.” is an exemplary opinion piece, but perhaps change is coming to NYC where most candidates for city council, responding to a StreetsBlog survey, signaled they’d be open to raising prices.
Todd Litman has put together another excellent article breaking down the unequal burden of automobile dependency. Parking tickets and fees are part of that regressive burden and, in some places, can lead to dangerous interactions with police. Burlington, Vermont is taking a step to prevent that by moving parking enforcement out of the purview of law enforcement. St. Louis is also taking steps to reduce the impact of parking tickets by offering a Parking, Towing Assistance program. But not all cites are moving towards greater leniency, Naples, Florida voted to give folks just 10 days to pay a ticket before the price goes up.
A Denver study finds that there’s too much expensive parking being built near transit-oriented development. It’s not just an issue in Denver, there are excess surface lots all over, but surface lots can be repurposed into logistics hubs, food cart pods, and other more productive uses. Another approach is to make it less appealing to run parking lots as a business, Hartford, Connecticut is planning to increase an existing surface lot tax and eventually expand it to garages.
COVID-19 continues to impact city budgets and parking revenue is way down. Portland, Oregon’s parking revenues are down more than 55% and the city is threatening to cut transit benefits, bike share, and safe routes to school. Aspen, Colorado has seen a big drop in parking demand and revenue, which funds bus service, and the city is delaying expansions in residential parking management until demand picks back up. But not all cities are seeing reductions in demand due to the pandemic, Sag Harbor, New York is experiencing an influx in new residents and dealing with their accompanied cars.
Greensboro, North Carolina and Fayetteville, Arkansas are moving forward with plans for new publicly-funded parking garages in their city centers.
We’ll finish up with a few links from across the Atlantic Ocean. Germany has some great examples of model neighborhoods with reduced car-dependency, but it’s only the beginning of what’s needed. Stadium parking in Glasgow could be turned into housing. And here’s an industry report from the British Parking Association on the Public Perceptions of Parking.
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