Before we build a parking structure in Newton Centre (current vision is on the Cypress Street lot), the city should buy or lease as much private parking as it can.
At the League of Women Voter’s No Parking! forum last night, parking consultant Jason Schreiber described how one city (Medford?) had plans to build a parking structure to meet an urgent need for more parking capacity. They discovered they had enough capacity, they just needed to better use the capacity they had. They were able to do that by adjusting incentives to make the more remote spaces more desirable: charge more for the central spaces and eliminate barriers that make the less central spaces less attractive.
Charging more (but not too much) for the central spaces increases highly desirable turnover in those spaces and gives some parkers (employees, commuters, and other long-term parkers) an incentive to seek out other, less-central spaces. The less-central spaces should be priced enough cheaper to provide the incentive. Barriers can include difficult-to-navigate intersections which make walking to and from the less-central spaces enough of burden to offset the cost savings.
The problem is that you need to have enough parking overall to meet demand. (That itself is not such a simple determination, but let’s leave it aside for today.) And, Newton Centre might not have enough public parking to meet demand. Hence the plans to build a parking garage.
But, parking structures are expensive ($25K+ per space). And, there is plenty of unused capacity in Newton Centre, albeit capacity on private lots.Wouldn’t it be cheaper to buy or lease existing, underused private parking spaces from the private owners?
The Walgreen’s lot is rarely more than half- or even a quarter-full. Here’s a four-step plan to convert Walgreen’s underused capacity to cure some of Newton Centre’s parking woes:
- Raise the meter rates along Langley to $2 or 3 per hour
- Lease the lot from Walgreen’s (actually the property owner)
- Add $1 per hour meters
- Put up big public parking signs to guide drivers to the lot
(The exact rates are not important, the differential is.)
Whatever the acquisition cost of those spaces is, it’s almost certainly less than the cost of the equivalent number of spaces in a new parking garage. More underused spaces: behind the Staples/Post Office building, behind the bank that used to be Brueggers, the church lots. The church lots are an interesting opportunity. Put in the lease terms that the churches have the right (for free) to use the lots on an as needed basis for weddings, funerals, and holiday services.
This was a terrific forum and Newton’s experience bears out everything that was said by the panel of experts.
In addition to market-based parking meter rates, we also need to reduce or eliminate highly restrictive parking requirements for restaurants and other businesses that add to the vitality of village centers. I have co-docketed an item that would replace parking waivers through special permits with “payments-in-lieu-of-parking” or PILOPs (pronounced “pileups”), which would be done through an administrative process rather than a special permit (except in cases where a truly substantial need for parking is demonstrated). And two key factors in making sure that PILOPs will work is (1) to dedicate the revenue from PILOPs–as well as market based meter revenue–to the village center generating the revenue, and (2) to spend the revenue on improvements that will make village centers more pedestrian friendly (e.g., pedestrian bumpouts, countdown crosswalk lights, reconfiguring pedestrian unfriendly intersections, etc.) and NOT to spend such revenue on parking garages. Parking garages cost $20,000-$25,000 a space; these other improvements are far cheaper and more effective and, if parking management is efficaciously done, there is no need for them.
My experience over the past 7 years on Land Use and the last 3 years as chairman have taught me that village centers do not implode when the Board of Aldermen grants special permits for parking waivers. The parking is there, it just isn’t available where it needs to be because the incentives for long term parkers to park farther from the village centers is just not there. So let’s manage the problem, not throw money at it for parking garages that will be empty.
That is not to say I am against parking structures in village centers. Indeed, I have been talking with Newton-Wellesley Hospital about building a garage behind the police station in West Newton which the hospital would use for satellite parking during the day, the city could use for police vehicles, and the public could use at night to go to restaurants and West Newton cinema. This would have all the benefits of a shared parking arrangement with a public/private partnership to share revenues and costs.
It was a really interesting presentation. Thanks to the LWV and the panelists.
I also came away convinced that what we really need more than more parking is more creative thinking.
I thought the idea of keeping a portion of any parking revenue in the neighborhood was particularly interesting. Offering a number of permits for long term parking near but not in our village centers could really help the employees of our local businesses. Adding the incentive of using permit fees for the village may soften the resistance of neighborhoods to having parking on their streets.
All of the above ideas sound really excellent. I hope the city will strongly consider them.
Here’s the story from Patch summarizing the event. Haven’t seen the Wicked Local story yet.
while awaiting NewTV’s editing work, you can get the general idea from this article by Jason Schrieber:
http://www.planning.org/planning/default.htm