Posts about RPP

As Dick VanderHart explains in the Portland Mercury, the neighborhood has a vibrant nightlife which attracted new visitors to the area. Those visitors compete with residents for parking. Curbside parking is free at all times.

Residents can request residential permits to limit visitor parking and overnight parking. Last year, the city created a "mini" parking district program so individual neighborhoods can create new small parking districts, but so far, none have requested one.

Perhaps that's because it's not really hard to park there. In a Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) survey, most residents said that they usually park on the street 1-2 blocks from their homes and most spend little time looking for parking.

It isn't clear that a parking problem exists in Portland today. Plus, building more off-street parking will not do anything about visitors patronizing the new bars and cafes in the area. That's especially true as long as parking is free on every street in the area. No matter how much garage parking new buildings have, many people will find it more convenient and cheaper to park on the street until the city limits on-street parking or charges for it.

This closely parallels issues in DC. In many neighborhoods, it's becoming more difficult to park. We have parking minimums, but they clearly aren't preventing this. The solution is not to cling tenaciously to parking minimums, but to set up a better system that actually manages on-street spaces.

The Portland zoning code didn't fail. Instead, the residents didn't or couldn't use other parking management tools. We don't know yet if switching the code back will improve matters for unhappy residents—the vote just happened last week—but it's unlikely.

The new Portland policy require one space per 5 units for buildings with 30-40 units, one per 4 for buildings of 41-50 units, and one per 3 for buildings over 51 units. If the developer puts in bike parking and car sharing, they can relieve some of the requirement.

Perhaps because of the impending election, Portland's council may have acted hastily. The city was also working on other policies to deal with parking through basic transportation demand management measures, but that proposal was not finished in time for the council vote.

Opponents have been complaining most strongly about the DC proposal to exempt residential buildings of up to 10 units from parking requirements citywide. Portland still exempts buildings up to 3 times that size.

Plus, while many tout Portland as a transit mecca for its pioneering streetcars and other policies, the percentage of trips by transit here is triple that of Portland, which has no subway at all. TriMet has cut service in recent years, while WMATA has not. DC neighborhoods whose residents consider their transit fairly meager still have a lot of transit by the standards of many parts of Portland.

Portland's parking experience is not proof that parking minimums are necessary. Instead, it shows that politics can get in the way of good parking policy. Just because politicians in one city had a knee-jerk but nonsensical reaction to a certain neighborhood's complaints does not mean DC should do the same.

In [an Examiner article from October, entitled "Parking conflicts prompting churches to flee D.C.,"] Lincoln Congregational Temple is mentioned as one of the complaining churches. On page 39 of the 1957 survey only 25% of its congregants lived in the area and supposedly of that, most were elderly, people who should be by now at home with Jesus. With the Savior and not driving and trying to find a parking spot.

In '57 a majority of their membership [were] up in Brookland and over in Kenilworth. It is possible that the church recruited a ton of members in the Shaw area since the survey, who then moved out of the area and come back on Sundays. However, I don't think that gives anyone a moral right to a parking spot, no more than having the right to use the toilet in your first apartment years after you turned in the keys and got[] your deposit back.

Shaw is chock full of churches, and some of them have figured out how to worship without double parking and the like. Sadly it is the ones who haven't seriously looked for solutions, other than breaking the law, who seem to scream the loudest. It is embarrassing as a believer, when some church leaders try to make parking a theological issue. Parking ain't in the Bible.

The parking problem has grown especially acute recently. Residents petitioned DDOT to extend residential permit parking (RPP) to Sundays, meaning churchgoers who don't live in the area can only park for 2 hours on RPP blocks and not at all on one side of every street. That has made it impossible for church patrons to use the street parking.

I also suspect that in 1957 Shaw had fewer resident-owned cars, so there wasn't the same level of competition for curb space.

DDOT has been working with individual churches for some time to try to find extra space that can accommodate parking on Sundays, like diagonal parking or space along the medians of wide avenues. But any such parking has to be open to all, not just churchgoers (anything else would be fairly clearly unconstitutional), and just adding more free parking won't ultimately solve the problem.

Many of the churches, but not all, have nearby office buildings or public schools with unused parking capacity on Sundays. There should be a way to work out a deal where the churches can use these lots. However, that parking won't be entirely free.

As we saw with the compromise the Washington Interfaith Network worked out for Columbia Heights churches to use the DC USA garage, once free parking is clearly not an option, suddenly a compromise that involves non-free parking becomes tenable.

The neighborhood parking also isn't entirely full, now that it's so restricted. It should be possible to let some people who want to drive to Shaw park on neighborhood streets, but there isn't room for all. How can DC allocate this scarce resource? The only ways to divvy up a limited resource is lottery, queue, pricing, favoritism (choosing one preferential group), or a hodgepodge.

Right now, it's favoritism for residents, with no option for others. The most sensible approach would be to set up a parking pass that's not free, perhaps also limited in number, which people could purchase to park in Shaw on Sundays. But the assumption that parking must be free, that free parking is a God-given right, is a straitjacket that forecloses better, creative solutions.

Update: The change to the parking included restrictions to RPP holders only on one side of every street. The original article did not mention this feature of the new policy. It has been corrected.

Imagine for a moment that each month the District somehow came into a lot of of gasoline, and set up a "residential gasoline program" where any resident could buy as much gas as they wanted for 10¢ a gallon, first come, first served.

What would happen? We'd all buy as much gasoline as we could, even if we didn't really need it. The supply would run out very quickly, and we'd start fighting over it. We'd start having to ration it. Special groups would argue that they're more deserving of gasoline than others.

Worst of all, we'd be inclined to prevent new people from moving to the District, because they'd be competing with us for our sweet deal on 10-cent-a-gallon gasoline. All of these unnecessary conflicts and complications and undesirable side effects. Why? Because the government is selling something valuable at a small fraction of its true market cost.

That's where we are today with residential parking. We don't have enough to go around, but we haven't faced up to that reality. The reason we're not having DC Council meetings about milk or about gasoline is that the demand for those things is moderated by price. And that's what needs to happen with residential parking.

The current system doesn't work

The RPP system is broken. I see 5 big problems with residential parking in the District today:

1. There are more residential permits than residential spaces available in many neighborhoods. As a result, for example, in Dupont, where I used to live, everyone wastes time and fossil fuels driving around and around looking for a spot.

2. Zones are huge and the boundaries drawn without regard to demand for parking. Very different neighborhoods like AU Park and Cleveland Park and Woodley Park are all arbitrarily lumped into the same parking zone. You have intrazone commuting, and people from AU Park can drive to my street, 2 blocks from the Cleveland Park metro, and park there all day, as if it were their neighborhood.

3. The cost is the same everywhere, whether you live in a very low-density suburban-style neighborhood like Edgewood or Chevy Chase or a high-density urban neighborhood like Adams Morgan or Logan Circle.

4. The 2-hour exception is arbitrary and useless in most real-world situations. It's more time than you need to pick up a prescription at CVS, but not enough time for dinner and a movie.

5. The system deals awkwardly or not at all with visitors like babysitters, houseguests, churchgoers, and others who have legitimate reasons to park in residential neighborhoods.

The solution is not to add complexity

How do we address these problems? The answer isn't to add more layers of regulatory complexity. The current system is already a tangled mess that only a lawyer could love. We don't need more special exceptions, special zones, carve-outs, or special categories of drivers. We don't need more rationing or hourly limits or weekly schedules. We don't need more indecipherable parking signage.

This doesn't need to be complicated. Let's start with two basic principles:

1. Storing my personal vehicle on public land provides me a personal benefit, and is not a public good. I'm not doing the people of DC a favor by parking on the street—to the contrary. So when I park on public land, I should bear the cost of that privilege, at approximately market rates, rather than paying a rate that's artificially low because it's subsidized by all DC taxpayers.
2. The value of parking varies according to demand, which varies according to location. Prices should be set zone by zone. But in order for residential parking zones to make sense, zones should be small and/or homogeneous enough to capture differences in demand from place to place.

What would this look like in practice?

Each small zone might have a base rate, based on demand. Everything else could then flow from that base rate: You'd have hourly rates and daily rates. Residential parking permits are essentially a yearly pass in the microzone of my choice, keyed to that zone's base price.

If I occasionally need space for visitors, I could buy books of day passes at a reduced rate. If I live in Chevy Chase and I want to drive to Metro in Cleveland Park and park on the street every day, then I could pay for daytime-only parking in that microzone. Babysitters or contractors could buy daytime passes as well. And so on.

In some parts of the city, residential parking may be so abundant that market value of parking is close to zero. There, the current token rate of $35 per year would continue to apply. In areas with high demand, the cost would be higher.

This may all sound like it would be complicated to implement, enforce, and comply with; but the technology exists to make this easy and is getting ever cheaper.

With this proposed approach, the only thing you ever have to consider is price. You park wherever you want, whenever you want, for as long as you want - as long as you're willing to pay what it's worth. Just like you can drink as much milk as you want, as long as you pay for it. Simple.

Does market pricing mean parking is just for rich people?

The District should do everything it can to reduce poverty and income inequality. But the District doesn't have across-the-board subsidies for clothes or furniture or gas or lots of other good and useful things.

Should the DC government subsidize parking? Perhaps, but certainly not for me and my comfortable neighbors in Ward 3. And even for low-income residents, we're not convinced that that subsidies for parking would be a particularly effective way to reduce poverty.

Surely there are more fundamental needs that we should be meeting first. We don't have enough affordable housing for people in DC, so it seems strange to argue that affordable housing for cars should be a priority.

At any rate, it's the current system that is profoundly regressive. About a third of DC households don't have a car at all. The existing parking subsidy takes money from all taxpayers, whether they drive or not, and effectively redistributes it to car owners in proportion to the number of cars they own. That's not fair and
it's not right.

Accurate pricing + better incentives = improved quality of life for everyone

I'm not "anti-car." My family owns a minivan and drives it and depends on it. But the current RPP system actively incentivizes more car ownership and more driving. Those incentives need to be reversed. Two personal cases in point:

1. My own family gets by on one car. We've often thought about buying a second car. So far we haven't, for a variety of reasons. But the cost of storing the car has never been a consideration in that decision. Why would it, when we can store the car on public land for practically nothing?
2. On my block, almost every house has a garage designed to house a car. Not a single one of those garages, including my own, ever has a car in it. We all keep our cars on the street, and use our garages for bikes and tools and junk. Why shouldn't we, when we can store our cars on public land for practically nothing?

More accurate pricing for residential parking would encourage individuals to find alternatives to owning a car; it would encourage families to own only as many cars as they need; and it would encourage people who have off-street parking to use it. All of this would result in fewer cars parked on the street, so that when
you do need to park, you can.

Imagine a city where every single block has a parking spot or two available, so when you do need to park you can always find a space, anywhere, any time of day or day of the week. Parking karma for everyone. That sounds like a fantasy, but it doesn't have to be. Because of market pricing, every gas station has gas, and every grocery store has milk and bread, and so on. We take this for granted, but we shouldn't.

With more accurate pricing, we can get there with parking as well. And in the process we can eliminate the underlying cause of so much of the neighborhood conflict and rancor we have over growth and development, and make DC a happier and more attractive and more livable place.

While demanding unlimited free parking isn't really fair, the Logan Circle churches have some reasonable gripes. A few months ago, Councilmember Jack Evans suggested to the Logan Circle ANC that they try this parking change; the ANC approved the plan and DDOT put it into place. The churches, evidently, weren't part of that discussion.

This is a simple matter of allocating a scarce resource. Before, the policy on Sundays was to allocate the spaces to whomever showed up first or circled around long enough to find a space. Now, it privileges residents at the expense of churchgoers or shoppers or others. Maybe that's a better policy, maybe not, but we all need to acknowledge that it's a tradeoff; when one group gets more privileges, another loses them.

Pricing has to be part of the equation

One participant, Emily from Adams Morgan, pointed out that the current political system favors residents, though not for any sound policy reason. She was one of the handful of people who pushed for a market-based pricing approach. There's still a way to go to sell this to the church folks, however; many were grumbling and shaking her heads when Emily, or anyone else, suggested that a solution to church parking is to stop having it all be free.

But that's ultimately what we have to do. Richard Layman pointed the finger for parking problems at the way most District parking policies assume parking should be free. Thus, the argument always revolves around whether to give one group free parking or another, rather than to use tools like pricing to manage demand.

He took aim at the sentiment that because people pay for RPP stickers, they have already paid their share. "You think you're paying for parking, but you're not paying squat," he said. Angelo Rao, DDOT's parking manager, also suggested RPP rates are too low, noting that the current sticker costs only 9.6¢ per day.

Several people, including outgoing southern Woodley Park ANC commissioner Anne-Marie Bairstow, new northern Woodley Park ANC commissioner Gwendolyn Bole, and Friendship Heights ANC commissioner Tom Quinn, all asked for smaller RPP zones.

Bairstow said the current visitor pass program, which automatically mailed out passes to every household, is flawed; she has neighbors who have driveways and garages and still got the passes, so they just gave them to friends from outside Ward 3 or even outside the District, who then use Woodley Park as a park-and-ride.

What's the answer for churches?

Smaller zones and higher RPP prices are policies that should clearly be part of any solution; the only obstacle is politics. The church issue is trickier. I've been pushing for a system where residents buy annual passes, as they do today but at a higher rate, for their immediate areas, and anyone else can buy daily passes, maybe at varying rates based on public policy.

Instead of the current visitor placards, give each resident a "booklet" of free day passes to use for contractors, nannies, dinner parties, or whatever else, and let them purchase more booklets if needed. For a church that really contributes meaningfully to its community (many do, some don't), we could give the church even more booklets, enough to provide for a large proportion of their parking need, but perhaps not all.

There needs to be some incentive for the churches and neighborhoods to work together in a partnership. Churchgoers can reduce their parking load to some extent, such as by organizing carpools. In some neighborhoods, there are empty office garages; if enough people were willing to pay to park in them, they could open on Sundays. But the church community has to be willing to figure out how to accommodate some of their demand in other ways.

The booklets could form an incentive to do this, if DDOT could manage the total numbers of booklets and passes it gives out so that the total demand doesn't vastly exceed supply. Or, economists might say, just give the church money and let them buy however many booklets they need, though that could be legally tricky.

The summit did bring this fundamental tension into clear relief. Lots of people want the spaces. There aren't enough. Someone has to divvy them up in some way. A program of letting anyone park for free doesn't work, and the complex patchwork of restrictions and limits that DDOT has been moving toward doesn't really work either.

Part 2:

DePuyt phrased the issue well early in the discussion: the simple challenge is that not everyone can park in a place like downtown. Some people need to drive, but everyone can't, so the basic policy debate is how to allocate limited spaces among different people in the "fairest" way, whatever that is (special set-asides for groups like residents or those with disabilities, market forces, and/or our current policy, allocating based on who will tolerate the most circling to find a spot or who gets lucky).

If DC changes its policies in this realm, it's not about "discouraging" people from driving; as a number of you pointed out in the comments on some recent articles, it's DC's growth, not a government conspiracy, that's making parking scarcer. All the government can do is change the way it manages the available space, for better or worse.

Block also noted that businesses in the BID don't expect they can gain customers by increasing parking, because it's not practical. Instead, what they want is a good parking "experience": making it easier to find where the empty spaces are, smoother methods of payment, etc.

Our discussion came in advance of a parking "summit" DDOT is holding this Tuesday 12/4, 6:30 pm at One Judiciary Square/441 4th Street, NW to talk about what they learned from their recent community meetings, survey, and our online chat. Councilmember Mary Cheh is also holding a hearing on the residential permit parking system Friday at 11 am.

Contractor parking bill takes the right approach

The contractor parking bill (committee report) will let licensed contractors get day passes to park on residential streets where they have jobs. Each pass will let them park for one day, until 5 pm. DDOT will set up a system for them to buy these passes, at a cost of $10 per day, and can adjust the rates in the future with a rulemaking.

This is a terrific solution to an important problem. (Full disclosure: I talked with Cheh's staff about this approach.) Our streets are reserved for residents, but residents often have contractors working at their houses. Contractors currently get in the habit of just parking illegally and absorbing some number of tickets as the cost of business, a cost they broadly pass on to homeowners.

Instead of making a contractor play a "reverse lottery" that they might get a big ticket, it makes far more sense to simply charge a reasonable fee. Over time, it would make sense for DDOT to customize the fee to different areas. In neighborhoods with plentiful daytime parking, the fee could be lower, and maybe in the neighborhoods with greatest demand it should be higher.

You might ask, should this just apply to contractors? Some people have housecleaners, or nannies, or elder caregivers come to the house. What about them? The answer is simple: a day pass program can work for them too. Maybe the rates would be lower, but this is generally a good solution to the weaknesses of the residential permit parking (RPP) program, and a better approach than annual placards that are too easily abused for areas with high parking demand.

Will the speed camera bill bring peace?

Meanwhile, a committee print of Tommy Wells' and Mary Cheh's bill on lowering speed camera fines (committee report) has many changes, which Council sources say mostly came from Chairman Phil Mendelson. Mendelson is still chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, and he referred the bill sequentially to both committees. Therefore, he has the opportunity to make changes.

One significant change is that the bill no longer dedicates any revenue from cameras to more cameras, safety education, traffic officers, or redesigning roads for lower "design speeds," as the original bill did.

As I've written many times, from an abstract policy point of view, lower fines make sense, as the level of fine doesn't appear to correlate with driver behavior. However, also from an abstract policy point of view, politicians shouldn't base their decisions on who shouts loudest, yet we know they do.

As Cheh noted in her opening statement at the hearing on the bill, the biggest motivation behind the bill is to remove public opposition that could stand in the way of more widespread safety-based enforcement. The question is, will this bill do that?

It could be that lowering fines suddenly creates a peace in the District where drivers and driver organizations generally accept cameras. Or, it might be that people who get tickets will scream about it just the same. While the purpose of the cameras shouldn't be and shouldn't have been revenue, now that they're here, there are other things one could spend money on besides buying down fines. Is it worth it?

We can't really know. The rationale for creating a special fund to help with future camera purchases was that it would make it easier for MPD to get new cameras without such a long and tortured process as it had for this last round. On the other hand, DC budget director Eric Goulet argued in his testimony that the fund wouldn't really end the need for the council to specifically approve new camera spending and contracts anyway, so it doesn't matter.

Another way to deal with this uncertainty would be to make the new fines temporary. Let's see how things work out for a year or so. If there's peace in camera land, then it was the right move and should be permanent. If we're still having the same arguments, then DC might as well take the revenue for all the headaches.

Fortunately, the new committee print does just that. It includes a sunset provision that it will expire at the end of the 2013 fiscal year (in September 2013). This also means that this bill wouldn't affect the FY2014 budget, which the Council will debate this spring.

It still does mean the bill would use up some of the "unanticipated revenue" that is coming in this year, instead of it going to another program such as the Housing Production Trust Fund.

On the other hand, the fines now aren't going down as much. The original bill set fines at $50 for speeding up to 20 mph over the limit, but now proposes levels of $50 for up to 10 mph over (which MPD doesn't usually ticket for) and $75 for 11-20 over. That probably means it will cost less, though it also means it might be less likely to assuage angry drivers who got a lot of tickets.

Another change, and not a great one, is that the bill now does not distinguish between fines for automated enforcement and fines from a police officer. This is simpler, but wrong. The idea behind lower automated fines is that there should be an inverse relationship between severity and certainty: if the chance of getting caught is higher, the punishment needn't be so high. With a camera, that's the case.

But if there's an area without cameras, but officers are doing some in-person ticket writing, the certainty is low again, so the fine needs to stay higher. Besides, low fines could make it harder for MPD to assign officers to writing tickets in safety trouble spots, since the tickets might not pay for the officer's time any more.

Cheh's committee is marking up the bill today, and then Mendelson's will mark it up tomorrow. He could push for changes, for better or worse, at that point. Then it will go before the Council, where members could try to amend it to further change provisions or restore some from the original bill.

The survey asks if you live on a block with Resident Permit Parking (RPP) and if you or guests use the visitor placards (VPP) DDOT has been piloting for the last few years. It also asks about whether you or your guests use bicycle parking. For each topic, the survey solicits your comments on what might not be working and any suggestions.

Use books of day passes for visitors

Feel free to say whatever you'd like on the survey, but I would encourage residents, especially those in denser neighborhoods, to ask DDOT to find a better solution than the annual visitor placards. Mailing an unlimited-use annual pass to every household is dangerous. We already have heard stories of people who don't need theirs giving them to other people who commute. It is likely to bring in more cars competing for already-limited curbside space, and creates an entitlement that will be very hard to reverse in the future.

On our last parking discussion, commenter ah made a sensible suggestion: a booklet of day "coupons." Each household receives one, and can get more; the best system would be to charge some fee for additional books. This could work with an actual, physical book, or an electronic system that keeps track.

In neighborhoods where parking is relatively plentiful, these extra books can be fairly cheap. In higher-demand areas, they could cost more, in order to keep the number of visitors to a manageable level that preserves parking space for others.

Books also give more flexibility than placards. What if you have 2 guests, or a whole bunch for a party? With a coupon book or the electronic equivalent, it's easy to give multiple coupons to multiple guests. Books could also solve many of the problems with firefighters and teachers needing to park: make them eligible to buy books as if they were residents.

Make performance parking work, for real

Over 4 years after the DC Council set up performance parking, DDOT has been very slow to adjust meter rates based on demand. The latest budget requires DDOT to expand performance parking citywide.

They need to make it work in Columbia Heights and the ballpark district, where it started, and on the newer zone on H Street. They need to set it up downtown and in Georgetown, where many have been clamoring for performance parking in places where people circle far too much to find a space.

Fix RPP's intra-ward commuting and limited hours

The Resident Permit Parking (RPP) system has generally achieved its goal of preventing people from driving into neighborhoods to commute, with a few exceptions. Some commuters drive to other neighborhoods within their own ward and park to use the Metro.

As demand rises in commercial corridors and performance parking sets meter rates more appropriately, people will try harder to park on residential blocks. DDOT has responded to this by reserving one side of many streets for residents only and lengthening RPP hours, though this creates new obstacles for people having dinner parties.

A simple market-based solution can work here too: Charge for non-residents to park outside RPP hours on resident blocks that have high parking demand. The pay-by-phone system can make this easy. Just charge more than the meters in the nearby commercial corridor. If space is available, people will prefer to park near the businesses they are going to. Unused space in the residential blocks can help meet the demand and raise revenue for neighborhood needs at the same time.

An RPP sticker still costs the same in any neighborhood in the city, but the relative supply and demand is not the same. A better RPP system would price stickers by neighborhood, based on that neighborhood's individual needs and circumstances.

What other methods do you think DDOT could employ to better manage its limited curbside space in a way that helps everyone?

DC parking zones are fundamentally unfair

Unlike almost all other cities, DC sets zones for its resident permit parking (RPP) program based on political ward boundaries, rather than a some objective and geographic standard. Our zones are also very large, larger than many other cities; instead of only helping residents park in their own neighborhoods, people get special rights to park in other people's neighborhoods so long as they are in the same ward.

Some people really like that. When redistricting moved the Palisades from Ward 2, which spans downtown, to upper Northwest's Ward 3 in 2002, residents objected. They were not upset because they didn't want the Ward 3 councilmember to represent them, but because they liked having a special privilege to drive to places like Foggy Bottom or Logan Circle and park with special resident privileges.

However, this is unfair to residents of the more desirable parking areas. At a recent parking hearing, Anne-Marie Bairstow of Woodley Park argued for smaller zones. She said that many people drive from other neighborhoods to Woodley Park, use their resident privileges to park, and take Metro. This deprives actual Woodley residents of the benefits of the RPP system.

It's also unfair to people who happen to live over a line. Palisades residents suddenly lost a privilege. Adams Morgan residents, who are in Ward 1, or Bloomingdale residents in Ward 5 never had that privilege in the first place.

This isn't the purpose of RPP. DC has a program to favor residents of an area in the competition for on-street parking spaces. It could limit that to only the immediate neighborhood, which would be fair, or perhaps it could instead give the privilege to anyone in the District, but giving it to an arbitrary set of alternative neighborhoods is not.

There's reason to be extra sensitive to this issue because redistricting moved Shaw out of Ward 2 and into Ward 6. Shaw happened to be the lowest-income and most-minority section of the ward, which has now gotten even richer and whiter. That gives this policy action an added economic and racial effect, whether or not that was the intent.

When Kingman Park moved from Ward 6 to 7, it stayed in Zone 6, so there is precedent already for keeping neighborhoods in zones other than their ward.

Upcoming Logan restriction will further discriminate against Shaw

Evans' office also recently proposed setting aside one side of every street in Logan Circle for Zone 2 parking only. Normally, most residential streets allow people with the right zone sticker to park all day, and people without it can still park during the day for 2 hours and nights and weekends without limit. But a few years ago, parts of Wards 1 and 6 started having one side of each street restricted so that people without the right zone sticker couldn't ever park there at all park there at all during RPP enforcement hours.

Evans decided to suggest this for Logan as well. However, his staff and the Logan ANC turned down a suggestion to limit the special privilege to people actually in Logan. If they had done that, this would have put equal limits on the people of Shaw and people of Georgetown (and Dupont, where I live). If this bill had passed, then Shaw would have still gotten the privilege, though people of Bloomingdale, the Palisades, or Columbia Heights would not.

Instead, we have an even less fair outcome than either of those.

Shaw doesn't only lose out; they do gain the ability to park with resident privileges in Ward 6, including H Street, Barracks Row, and around the ballpark. That includes a lot of streets that only allow Ward 6 parkers on one side. However, while there hasn't been any kind of ward-wide poll, at least some Shaw leaders had specifically asked to stay in Zone 2, suggesting that residents preferred 2. Most of 2 is closer to Shaw than most of 6.

The best solution is to let DDOT, or some sort of independent commission, set parking zone boundaries based on neighborhoods and geographically-similar regions instead of political wards, as most other cities do. Or the zones could correspond to ANCs, with a provision that people right near an edge can still park in an adjacent zone.

But taking privileges from Shaw without taking them from other neighborhoods to the west isn't the right answer and isn't fair.

Other neighborhoods are unhappy about the numbers of out-of-state students who get reciprocal parking permits, or large buildings getting built which flood the area with RPP-eligible residents and make on-street parking more difficult where once it may have been simple.

Other times, RPP goes too far. For example, firefighters at some stations around the District, whose hours and locations make transit impractical, are getting tickets for parking on the street because they aren't residents. These firehouses have no parking of their own, the firefighters say they have no alternative places to park, and their latest contract includes a requirement that DC provide some free parking.

Issues like this have led to a plethora of bills this session which either create small exceptions to RPP eligibility, to reduce the number of permits, or exceptions to RPP rules, to allow certain people to park where they can't today.

There's the Firehouse Parking Exception Amendment Act of 2011 (introduced by Mendelson, Cheh, and Kwame Brown), the Reserved Parking Spaces Amendment Act of 2012 (Barry), Neighborhood Spillover Parking Prevention Amendment Act of 2011 (Wells), and Neighborhood Contractor Daytime Parking Permit Amendment Act of 2011 (Wells).

Some of these specific carve-outs address a legitimate need, but these needs arise from the inflexible, one-size-fits-all, black-and-white nature of RPP. Rather than making parking even more complicated than it already is, it could be simple and satisfy all of these concerns.

A simple guest pass program would be simpler

Let's supplement RPP with a comprehensive system of guest passes.

There are already a number of guest passes which have already confused DC parking. Households in some wards get a single guest pass mailed to each car-owning household, which they can give to guests. But what if someone wants to have multiple guests? And in some wards, like the denser Ward 2, there are no guest passes because they'd be too ripe for abuse.

People can also go to the police station to get passes good for up to 2 weeks, but it's a pain to go to the police station. They are sometimes quite far away; I happen to live in the same police district as upper Northwest, and the police say I have to go to the station near McLean Gardens.

This can be much simpler. Just create an online application where a resident can log on, request a guest pass, and print one out for a small fee. The pass can be good for a day, or for a higher fee, a week or two. They enter the license plate of the vehicle, pay, and it prints. For those without computers, they can go to a library, or DC could put computers in some more locations, perhaps including the police stations.

Each pass would list the license number, the ANC zone where it's valid, and the date. Neighbors who see someone using a pass for a different car can call 311 to report it, making it even easier to enforce without needing a lot of parking officers or cameras.

Parking enforcement officers, who already carry networked handheld computers, can spot check some against the central database to make sure nobody has actually forged a pass using Photoshop. Make it a real crime to actually alter a pass, as opposed to just not having one or using the wrong one or an expired one, which should bring no more than a parking ticket.

The fee can depend on demand

Some DC neighborhoods have too many people trying to park and want to limit stickers. Others have mostly empty streets during the day, and need exemptions for the firehouses and home caregivers. This system can easily accommodate both.

In ANC zones that have low demand, make the fee for a pass about as much as one day's round-trip bus fare. That makes sure driving is not more appealing than transit, but neither is it very expensive. Let a household print out as many as they'd like, or maybe cap it at some high number, like 500 car-days per year. People can print out 10 in one day if they want to.

For ANC zones with high demand, just set a higher price. Maybe each household could get a small number of daily passes per year, like 25, at the low price, or maybe that's too complicated.

Carve-outs become unnecessary

With this system, there's no longer any need for bills to grant different groups of people permission to park in RPP zones. Instead, everyone can get the passes. Instead of needing the Neighborhood Contractor Daytime Parking Permit Amendment Act of 2011, any contractor doing work for a homeowner can get a guest pass from the homeowner, for instance.

For the firehouse parking, DC could give firehouses a number of daily passes as well. If a firehouse needs 6 spaces, as some are asking for, instead let them get 6 passes times 365. Better yet, give a small "parking allowance" to each firefighter, and let them buy these passes. If they don't need to park because they can carpool or take transit or decide to live nearer to work, then they can keep the parking allowance.

It would be helpful for Councilmember Cheh to hear from people who've thought about sensible parking policies beyond just wanting exemptions for themselves. You can sign up to testify by emailing abenjamin@dccouncil.us. The hearing starts at 11:30 in room 412 of the Wilson Building, 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW.