Happy New Year! The Parking Reform Network got a flurry of end-of-year new members! We’re now pretty close to 150! Join the Parking Reform Network to support our work (including these posts).
We added a few podcasts to our link library and we’ll be adding and tagging more parking-related posts there soon. Here’s an interview from September with Don Shoup on ActiveTowns podcast. It covers the basics of parking reform and gives some hints about what he’s working on next. Follow that up with another interview with Shoup you might have missed a few months back on The Parking Podcast.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
West Hollywood, California is moving their paper-based guest permit system for residential neighborhoods online. Residents will now be able to pay online and register the license plate of their guests, rather than buying one-time permits from the Sheriff’s Office. This is a good idea and perhaps will open the door for other innovations, like charging AirBnB guests market rates for overnight parking in neighborhoods.
One NYC suburb is hoping to close it’s COVID-19 related budget gap by raising the price of commuter parking permits. Sales were down significantly this year and next year the price will go up from $400 to $700 annually at one station. It’s a bit backwards to charge higher prices when the demand goes down. Municipalities facing a shortfall now should quickly adopt performance-based pricing for all their assets. They should be ready to backfill budgets when demand returns post-pandemic.
Finally, a blurb in this NextCity post covers a textbook published by ORO Editions that came out this year, Increments of Neighborhood. [This is an affiliate link to bookshop.org, a B-Corp. If you buy the book through our link, we get a kickback.] It’s a guidebook for building walkable communities which apparently has quite a bit of parking content. Have you read it? Let us know what you thought in the comments or on Slack.