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I suppose street parking fulfills three purposes unique to its location: buffer between traffic and pedestrians, loading/unloading areas for businesses, and convenient parking for quick trips. Although an ideal world wouldn't have street parking, and all car-storage would take place off the streetscape, that is certainly not low-hanging fruit. Indeed, I'd suspect that land values and pedestrian traffic would have to be quite high to justify using part of a development envelope for a parking structure in place of street parking. Manhattan strikes me as one example, but even there one sees cars parked on the street in all but the most frequented areas. One area where road width, and therefore parallel parking, should be examined is 16th from U to Columbia Road, where the sidewalk is often clogged with people and bikes.

Diagonal parking, however, is another beast. The amount of street width used by such parking is often enough to justify switching it to parallel or eliminating it altogether for bike lanes or increased sidewalk width.

by OctaviusIII on Jun 6, 2011 4:04 pm • link • report