Parking
Day pass program helps residents, protects businesses
by Jack McKay
Vacant daytime parking on 19th Street. Photo by Jack McKay.
Mount Pleasant is about to establish a Daytime Parking Pass program, allowing commuters to park on Residential Permit Parking (RPP) streets during the day for a small fee. This program attempts to bring the benefits of RPP to more residents without imposing great hardships on people who drive to Mount Pleasant to work in our neighborhood businesses and institutions.
Under the program, businesses and their employees will be able to purchase parking passes for $160 per calendar quarter, or just under $2.50 a weekday. These passes will allow the owner to park on certain blocks Monday through Friday, between 9 am and 5 pm, on all blocks west of 18th Street, where daytime occupancy is low. DDOT will issue up to 200 passes, each tied to a specific vehicle.
There is enough room in Mount Pleasant for these visitors. I estimate that three thousand cars depart the neighborhood every morning, taken by residents to their jobs, whereas perhaps a hundred cars arrive, brought by suburbanites who have jobs here. The recent Traffic Study found over 500 curbside parking spots vacant on a weekday, despite those incoming commuters.
However, District's patchwork block-by-block RPP zoning leaves many Mount Pleasant blocks unprotected by RPP. Non-permit cars fill up the unzoned blocks. Parking occupancy on these blocks, like Newton, Monroe, and Ingleside, far exceeds nearby RPP-zoned blocks such as Lamont, Kilbourne, and Kenyon.
If all these cars clogging the unzoned blocks were commuters who went home at sunset, there wouldn't be such a great problem. But about half this difference comes from resident-owned cars that don't have RPP permits, generally because the owners prefer to keep their cars registered out of state. Those cars occupy precious curbside parking, day and night, for weeks on end.
Mount Pleasant residents want to apply RPP to the rest of the blocks, partly to deal with these out-of-state-registered cars warehoused on their blocks, and partly to get RPP stickers for themselves as well. Under the District's RPP system, that residents of unzoned blocks can't get RPP stickers. Those residents cannot park even right around the corner from their own homes on RPP-zoned blocks. The District treats residents of unzoned blocks just like commuters from the suburbs.
Much to the credit of these unhappy residents, while they want their blocks RPP-zoned, they don't want to make it impossible for people driving to jobs in Mount Pleasant to park, especially people working at the neighborhood elementary school or a nursing home. DDOT designed the daytime-pass system to help these commuters.
But you would be wrong to think that they're grateful for it. Residents could just petition for RPP without the daytime pass and tell these commuters to take the bus. Instead, the commuters get the daytime pass program. Given the value of curbside parking, and the fact that these commuters pay no taxes to the District, and that commercial garage parking is three or four times that costly, this would seem to be a reasonable fee for all-day parking on neighborhood residential streets. But the cry from these commuters has been, essentially, why can't this parking be free? Free is what they're accustomed to, and free is what they want. Some residents, sympathetic to these elementary-school and nursing-home workers, agree. Others note that $2.50 a day is a pretty reasonable parking rate.
Councilmember Jim Graham is holding a community meeting to hear what residents and commuters think about this proposed daytime-pass program. The meeting is May 21st, 6:30 pm at Bancroft Elementary, on Newton Street NW at 18th Street. DDOT is also looking at this commuter-parking-pass program as a model for other District neighborhoods that face this conflict between RPP, which prohibits automobile commuters altogether, and neighborhood businesses and institutions that depend on some auto commuters. The policy in Mount Pleasant may lead the way for the entire District.
Should commuter parking passes be free? If not, then how much should they cost? Should there be such parking passes at all? This may be decided by whoever shows up on May 21st.
Jack McKay is an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for ANC 1D in Mount Pleasant.
Comments
@ggwash
- Bikeshare is a gateway to private biking, not competition
- Short-term Washingtonians deserve a voice, too
- Judge denies injunction against closing schools
- Long-term closures: A solution to single-tracking?
- Public land deals have both benefits and pitfalls
- PG planners propose bold new smart growth future
- Metro policy for refunds after delays falls short, riders say
by RS on May 11, 2009 12:25 pm • link • report
by Lance on May 11, 2009 1:34 pm • link • report
And also think about having one side of each street (in selected areas) be residents only.
by ah on May 11, 2009 2:44 pm • link • report
by Paul S on May 11, 2009 2:55 pm • link • report
Why? If we are to solve our parking problems, the easiest to solve is "where should I park my car when I am at home?". Given that the where and when here is easily predictable in advance, solving it by securing one's own off-street parking is easily done (provided we ensure as a matter of public policy that there is sufficient off street parking to be bought/rented). Predicting in advance when/where to park your personal vehicle when you're out shopping, going to a restaurant, visting friends, etc. is much much harder to predict. And since our streets are supposed to be "public" streets to be used for a variety of "public" purposes, doesn't it make much more sense to only allow people to leave their car on the public street for shortterm, "going about one's 'travels' through the city" for 'public' business purposes ... And NOT set any aside for the much more 'private' reason of "storing" (or "longterm") parking one's cars ... when the option of private, predictable, "arrangable in advance" idea of off street makes so much more sense?
by Lance on May 11, 2009 4:25 pm • link • report
The first expanded RPP is now in effect in Ward 6 below Independence Avenue. Around the ballpark in SE, a few streets are metered for visitors while the vast majority are 7-day RPP until 9pm with only one side of the street available for up to 2 hour rental by visitors at market rate. In SW because of waterfront nightlife it's 7 days until midnight. JDLand's site has a good map showing the expanded RPP here: http://www.jdland.com/dc/stadium-parking.cfm
I think this is what is in our future. At least in my neighborhood nightclub patrons take all the curb spots on weekends and residents without their own parking spots have to pay to park at night and walk or transit back to their homes. It's really unacceptable for free curb parking to encourage people going out to drink to drive.
There's also a serious environmental impact as homeowners cut down trees to pave over their rear yards for parking. The additional cost in health care from poorer air quality and from storm water collection costs is huge. It's one thing to say that new residential developments should plan for where their residents will park, and quite another to say that existing residents should lose their parking unless they pave their rear yards.
In line with it's Smart Growth Plan, Arlington has now gone to 24/7 RPP parking with no RPP stickers for new residential buildings. Residents of new buildings are informed beforehand that they will have to make arrangements for any auto they plan to bring in.
by Tom Coumaris on May 11, 2009 11:30 pm • link • report
I agree by and large with what you have to say, however I don't think we should just accept the fact that we should provide on-street long term parking for residents because the only other solution is that they "pave their rear yards." There are many many other alternatives to solving this shortage of longterm parking options in these older neighbors ... if one takes a long term approach to the problem. For example, requiring that developers add more parking to their developments than their own development requires helps. ("Done" examples incluce the Target parking in Columbia Heights and Adams Morgan. Future examples would include the Utopia Project and the Hudson/Whitman Walker Building Project off of 14th.) I.e., with new development in a neighborhood you can make plentiful offstreet (preferably underground) parking available for all (old and new) in that neighborhood.
Yes, it won't happen overnight ... and in the meantime you need to keep some on street parking available for residents as you make the transition, BUT you don't want to INCREASE the set aside for resident long term street parking during this transitionary period. That is going in the wrong direction and sets wrong expectations. Going the "one side of the street is residential parking 24/7" does just that. It'll be hard enough getting people accumstomed to having to pay for the storage costs that having a car in the city generates as things stand. It'll be even harder to do so if they come to believe that they have a proprietary parking right to half the curbside space on the street in front of their house/apartment.
by Lance on May 12, 2009 9:40 am • link • report
Add a Comment