Photo by slack13 on Flickr.

Jim Graham just announced a new bill to expand the Columbia Heights performance parking pilot to the other neighborhoods in Ward 1, with input from ANCs. The bill will also expand the recently-announced Mount Pleasant visitor parking pass program to the rest of the ward. The Mount Pleasant program, with day passes for sale to employees and business owners, is a big improvement over the other visitor pass pilot programs in DC, and we should absolutely expand performance parking. At the same time, a real performance parking program should make visitor passes totally unnecessary.

First, here’s a bit of background on visitor passes. Residents of car-dependent neighborhoods in Ward 4 had been asking for visitor passes so that out of town guests, cleaning staff, home health care workers, and others could park on neighborhood streets for more than two hours during the daytime parking restrictions. DDOT responded by creating a pilot program where each household received one pass they could give to guests. Then, Ward 3 residents started asking for it, and Mary Cheh persuaded DDOT to expand the program. Graham followed suit with language in the original performance parking legislation to have DDOT design a similar program for Mount Pleasant.

As I argued when the original legislation was passed, a visitor program is a poor solution to a real problem, while performance parking is the right solution. It’s right that visitors should be able to park for free during the day on streets where there’s plenty of parking. That’s why, under a performance parking system, the meters would dynamically set the price on such streets at zero. And anyone could park there. It’s simple. Meanwhile, in areas of high parking demand, the price wouldn’t be zero, and visitors or anyone else could make a simple choice: pay, park farther away, or don’t drive. The beauty of real performance parking is that it works not just in the busiest areas, as we’re trying it now, but (except for the cost of multi-space meters) in the least-busy areas too. Performance parking isn’t just about raising the cost; it’s about setting the right cost, which sometimes is higher and sometimes is zero.

Without performance parking, we’re stuck with a hodgepodge of prohibitions that are hard to understand, complex to administer, and unfair to someone. The Mount Pleasant plan extends the hodgepodge in furtherance of worthy goals. Here are the provisions of the plan:

  1. Every household would get a pass, as with the Ward 4 and 3 pilots.
  2. The passes and RPP stickers would only be valid in Mount Pleasant (the boundaries of ANC 1D).
  3. DDOT would sell 200 Day Parking Passes (DPP), for $160 per quarter. These DPPs would let a business owner or employee park between 9 am and 5 pm on streets DDOT identifies that have at most 60% occupancy during the day.

This isn’t such a bad plan, under the circumstances. Still, as with any such program, it has flaws. For example what if an employee works until 6? And why 200, and why $160? How about auctioning them off, instead? How about allowing DDOT to add more each quarter if many blocks are still under 60%? And how do we stop residents from selling their visitor passes?

A real performance parking program would solve this very simply: the roads under 60% would be free. If enough people started trying to park there that their occupancy went over 85%, they’d stop being free. If we’re concerned about non-employees parking and taking Metro (not an especially big danger in Mount Pleasant), we can set up a discount for businesses and employees, and an even bigger discount for residents.

The visitor program restricts the passes to a single ANC. We really ought to restrict RPP passes to smaller areas as well. The original intent of RPP was to stop commuters from driving into a neighborhood and parking all day. With ward-sized zones, that’s still a problem in Woodley Park, for example, where people drive from remote edges of DC and park there. I suspect Petworth, Brookland, and others have similar problems. Instead, each RPP sticker should apply to a smaller zone, and the ANC boundaries are as good as any.

The legislation will also expand the Columbia Heights parking pilot to other parts of the Ward, with the ANCs’ opinions strongly considered in deciding where to expand it. I think expanding performance parking is a great idea, but it’s premature right now. The Columbia Heights plan hasn’t really had time to work; I believe DDOT hasn’t even started setting meter rates based on market demand. And Columbia Heights hasn’t seen direct benefits. The backbone of Shoupism is that market rates create direct benefits for the community. We should establish Columbia Heights’ success, and let surrounding neighborhoods see the new infrastructure paid for by parking money, before rushing to pass new parking laws.

Based on his release, Graham is most excited about the visitor pass program and one particular provision of performance parking: new RPP-only zones. The old RPP system let anyone park for two hours for free. Under the performance parking pilots, many blocks get market-rate meters, and other blocks are restricted so that visitors can’t park there at all. According to Tommy Wells, while the market-rate meters have some strong defenders and some critics, the RPP-only zones have been very popular in Capitol Hill, where Library of Congress employees had been parking and moving their cars every two hours (which isn’t legal, by the way). Those residents now have blocks completely devoted to their cars.

Before the performance parking pilot started, I attended a community meeting on the topic. The one most common request from those residents (representing the 25% of Columbia Heights residents who do own cars) was for more resident-only blocks. Graham is responding to this request with the bill. Like the visitor parking plan, this is an elements which give something to residents without taking anything away directly.

But these provisions do take something away from residents in a more subtle way. The visitor passes will increase the numbers of cars vying for limited spaces, making parking more difficult, and the RPP-only zones intensify parking demand elsewhere. By giving away free parking to more people, we increase traffic and pollution. The only real solution to manage parking demand is real performance parking, which sets market prices for all blocks. In blocks with low demand, the price goes to zero, while on crowded blocks, the higher prices encourage those with an alternative to take transit, bike, walk or carpool.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.