Posts about Daytime Parking Passes

Parking

Underpriced parking is taking potential funds from transit

by David Alpert   •   June 25, 2009 12:21 pm

Councilmember Jim Graham is trying hard to make parking easy. He's proposed reserving one side of every block for resident-only parking. That would be a valuable element of a larger, comprehensive approach to parking. Just on its own, it will make parking easier for some and harder for others. We need to approach this problem holistically, rather than piecemeal. Fundamentally, our parking policy suffers from one consistent problem: we're giving it away too cheap.

Photo by iandavid.

A house with a private parking space costs up to $100,000 more per space. If you want to park in a garage, that's hundreds a month. But on-street parking is virtually free. Why?

Bus rides aren't free. Housing isn't free. Electricity isn't free. Why is parking free?

At the last parking hearing, Graham asked, shouldn't people be able to own cars? It can be fun to own a car. Yes, it can be fun. It's also fun to ride rollercoasters or own yachts or travel to Europe, but the DC government does not pay to make these things free.

Right now, it costs $2.50 a day to ride the bus (with SmarTrip). Yet if you live in the same ward as your workplace, or work near blocks not zoned for RPP, it's free to drive and park. Why? The proposed Mount Pleasant guest parking program operates on a simple premise: let people buy day passes to park on streets in the neighborhood that aren't full during the day, and charge just a little more than round-trip bus fare. And the revenue from permits could improve that bus service for the employees who don't drive

If you go to shop in Adams Morgan by car, it's either very easy to find parking (during the day), or just about absolutely impossible (in the evening). People drive around and around, creating substantial traffic and making 18th Street more dangerous. The garages aren't cheap, while parking all evening on Champlain Street, if you can find a space there, is free. Residents should park for free, but isn't there a better way to allocate the remaining spaces beyond luckiest or most circled, first served?

How about multispace meters that let drivers (neighborhood residents exempted) pay the same rate as the meters on 18th, and set those meter rates at the right level to promote turnover? It would become easy as pie to park in Adams Morgan, just not free. But why should it be free when it's not free to take the Circulator, and even more not free to take a cab? That revenue could make the Circulator cheaper, or more frequent.

Graham's bill proposes one free visitor pass for each household. Some residents have wondered whether that would just invite abuse, like people selling passes on eBay to commuters from Maryland. Do we really trust DC to enforce restrictions against that? Why not let visitors simply buy the same permits that employees would get under the proposed day pass program, and mail each household a book of them—say, 25 per year, which is one every other week?

You can buy a resident parking permit for $15 a year, and another, and another, for as many cars as you like. Some households have three or four cars (or more). $15 a year is about four cents a day. Graham's bill contains a provision to charge higher rates for the second ($50) and third ($100) RPP passes per household. What about group homes and big families? At the previous hearing, Mount Pleasant's Gregg Edwards suggested giving each household one pass free or cheap, and if they have more than two adults, one more pass for each two adults. The next pass costs $50, then $100, and doubling thereafter. However, this would require a reliable way to verify where people live, as in many households the utility bills don't list every resident.

Imagine if we let employees or visitors park on underutilized streets in residential neighborhoods, as long as they paid a few dollars a day; let shoppers park on side streets, as long as they paid a dollar or two an hour; let residents park one car for cheap, but charged more for second and third RPP passes; and poured all that money into making transit, like Metrobus and Circulator service, cheap, frequent and reliable. Wouldn't Ward 1 residents be better off?

Parking

Five ways to improve the RPP system

by David Alpert   •   May 19, 2009 3:37 pm

The Council's twin bills to reserve one side of every residential block for residents only are well-intentioned, but overly simplistic solutions to the complex problem in DC's Residential Permit Parking (RPP) system. How could we do better?

Photo by dipdewdog.

1. Change higher RPP fees for more cars. The bills already contain one good element, which the Council should retain: they increase the fees for the second, third and subsequent cars each household registers in the RPP program. The current provisions make the first permit cost $15, as today, but then charge $50 per year for the second and $100 per year for the third and additional permits.

   Why not go a little further? Let's make the first sticker per household completely free. $15 is already almost free, low enough that few people seriously consider whether to get an RPP sticker when registering a car. Some lower-income households do say that this is a burden. A charge of zero for the first permit, $50 for the second, and $100 for the third would bring in about the same amount of revenue as today.

   This system does contain some complications. Does a townhouse divided into four apartments count as four households, each entitled to one permit at $15 or zero? What about a group home with four bedrooms, each rented out separately but not classified as separate units in the tax records? What about basement apartments, some of which are official and some aren't?

2. Expand the Daytime Parking Pass program. As Jack McKay explained, the DPP program is a good solution to allow employees of local businesses to park in a neighborhood. The proposed cost is only about the same as the cost of commuting by bus. We should expand this system to the neighborhoods affected by this bill.

3. Meter more spaces, and let businesses use the revenue. If store and restaurant patrons can't use half the spaces in any neighborhood, even during daytime hours when demand is low, then we need to manage the remaining spaces better to increase turnover and ensure some available spaces. A shopper wouldn't care if there were fewer spaces as long as they could get one of them. With meters, they could.

   If residents have one side of the street for themselves, plus free parking on the other side, visitors have guest passes, and employees can get daytime parking passes, then the only remaining people who need parking are patrons of businesses. Therefore, let's allow the businesses to set up performance parking on their own.

   Let any official BID or Main Streets organization buy their own meters and place them on blocks in their territory. Residents with a sticker for the appropriate zone could park at those meters for free, as could anyone with a visitor or daytime parking pass. Everyone else would pay, and the BID or Main Streets group would get the money directly. They could spend that money to clean up the streets, install new trash cans, or fund DDOT programs like street resurfacing or new streetlights. Petrons of those businesses would be the ones paying, and so the revenue should go to the businesses to offset any deterrence effect of having meters.

   If a BID doesn't want to do it, they don't have to. The non-resident-only side of every block can stay free, and most likely overcrowded. Patrons of their businesses can park for free if they're willing to circle for a while. Or, they can let everyone get a space fairly quickly by paying. Or, a neighborhood could have a mixture of the two. The local business association knows the occupancy level better than DDOT, and could adjust meter rates without having to wait months or years for studies. Most of all, we could manage parking while ensuring, as much as possible, that it doesn't hurt businesses.

4. Allow neighborhoods to choose smaller RPP zones. DC initially instituted the RPP system during Metro's construction, to prevent people from driving in and parking next to Metro stations. However, this still happens in some of DC's larger wards, like Ward 3, where some people from the edge of the District drive and park for free in Woodley Park or Cleveland Park. The purpose of the program was never to give some people, like Georgetown residents, special privileges to park in Logan Circle near their jobs just because they happen to be in the same ward.

   Some neighborhoods would oppose changing this system. Therefore, let's allow each ANC to decide to opt out of full-ward RPP zoning. If ANC 1B (U Street) chooses, they could vote to change their zone from 1 to 1B. All car owners registered in 1B would switch from Zone 1 to Zone 1B, and all RPP blocks in 1B would become 1B-only.

5. Extend RPP hours. Most RPP zones restrict parking until 6 or 8 pm. That was great for the original purpose of stopping commuters, but doesn't deal with the shoppers who come to a neighborhood at night. Councilmember Wells' bill contains a provision that if 51% of the households on a block petition, they can extend RPP to a later time, up to midnight. In addition, they should be able to extend it to apply on weekends as well.

   I'd also suggest that the ANC, rather than a 51% petition, make the decision. Parking on each block doesn't only affect the residents on that block, as people frequently park one or two blocks away. An ANC single-member representative would effectively balance these needs, and ANCs as a whole could consider the needs of one representative against the rest of the neighborhood, usually deferring to the local representative as they typically do.

What do you think of these options? What else would improve DC's residential permit parking system?

Parking

Without balance, parking bills will hurt business

by David Alpert   •   May 19, 2009 11:41 am

Parking on one side of every residential street in DC's Wards 1 and 6 could be reserved for residents only, at all times of the day, under a pair of bills introduced by Jim Graham and Tommy Wells, the Councilmembers for those two wards. Tomorrow, the Council will hold a hearing on both bills, the Residential Parking Protection Pilot Act of 2009 and the Ward 6 Residential Parking Protection Pilot Act of 2009. In addition, one or both bills would provide visitor parking passes to residents, expand RPP sticker eligibility, and adjust RPP fees.

Photo by slack13.

The first covers Adams Morgan, Mount Pleasant, Columbia Heights and U Street, while the second would encompass Capitol Hill, Southwest Waterfront, Near Southeast, and Mount Vernon Triangle. Both would reserve one side of every block with Residential Permit Parking (RPP) for residents of the individual wards. Households would each get one visitor pass to hand to daytime domestic workers or out-of-town visitors, entitling that visitor to park in a residential space. The Ward 1 bill also specifies that every household in the ward can receive a sticker for their car. Currently, residents of some apartment buildings facing commercial streets, or people who live on non-RPP zoned streets, are not eligible for the stickers, and thus receive no RPP privileges at all.

Is it right to reserve one side of every block for residents only? Many residents feel that curbside spaces outside the commercial areas are "theirs," and residents ought to receive priority for the limited parking spaces available. Especially near popular nighttime destinations, visitors from other wards or outside DC park on residential blocks for free, and outside of RPP hours, often for a long period of time. I used to live right near Lauriol Plaza, in an area without off-street garages and where almost all parking spaces are residential. At night or on weekends, I'd need to circle for 15-30 minutes to find a parking space. On the other hand, preventing those visitors from parking in certain spaces without making it easier for them to find other spaces will also harm the businesses they patronize.

Reserving space for residents, like widening freeways, may only alleviate pressure in the very short term. Many people don't own cars, and others pay relatively high rates to park in off-street garages. Making it easier for residents to park will only encourage more people to own cars or save cost of off-street garaging. The new cars vying for the same spaces will make on-street parking once again difficult. Therefore, this bill may only shift the equilibrium state to one with more resident cars. Moreover, by increasing eligibility for RPP stickers and adding visitor passes, even more cars can now occupy those spaces indefinitely, increasing demand.

Moreover, residents aren't the only people who need to find spaces to park. Employees of local businesses do, and so do the patrons. The Mount Pleasant daytime parking pass program is the right solution for employees. Instead of keeping blocks unzoned for RPP, which invites abuse, or forcing employees to move their cars every two hours, which is illegal, the program lets employees buy a parking pass for a daily rate similar to one day's bus fare. And, of course, many employees do reach their jobs by public transit.

That leaves shoppers, diners, and other patrons of the local businesses. Ideally, in dense areas like Ward 1, most patrons arrive by transit, but some do have to drive, whether because they live in car-dependent areas, can't walk long distances, or many other reasons. If we simply make it harder for those people to reach our neighborhood commercial areas, they won't.

New parking garages cost far too much money and further promote automobile dependence and traffic. DC first tried out reserving one side of each street as part of the performance parking pilots in Columbia Heights and Capitol Hill. There, we prohibited shoppers from using certain spaces, but also added meters to many spaces closer to the businesses and set the rates at market prices. The meters encouraged turnover. Patrons found it harder to park on residential streets, but easier to find metered spaces, and could confidently park near a restaurant for a tiny fraction of the price they spent on dinner.

Residents have been extremely happy with those pilots, particularly the part reserving one side of every street. Unfortunately, DDOT hasn't seriously worked to prove the value of complete performance parking, overpricing some areas and limiting hours, and just not getting the meters installed. No wonder Councilmembers who initially supported the program are now picking it apart.

Nevertheless, a unified strategy is better than a piecemeal one. The performance parking pilots helped out residents and shoppers. Replicating one without the other could cause great harm. Residential parking scarcity is a problem for many residents. However, this bill isn't the best solution, and doesn't solve the entire problem. A few years ago, a Parking Task Force set up by Mayor Anthony Williams looked at the issues of parking, and formulated some more thorough recommendations. In the next installment, we'll look at some of those and how the Council could improve these bills to actually help residents and businesses alike.

Parking

Day pass program helps residents, protects businesses

May 11, 2009 11:56 am

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.