Tag: parking
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Charlottesville’s Parking Gamble
The People’s Republic of Charlottesville is undertaking an interesting experiment — the city has approved development of the Center of Developing Entrepreneurs (CODE), a Silicon Valley-inspired office space, that provides only 74 parking spaces downtown for as many as 600 workers. Worried that the project will aggravate the parking shortage around the Downtown Mall, some…
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Needed: The Right Parking Policies for a Growing Richmond
by Stewart Schwartz Editor’s Note: The City of Richmond has launched a parking study focused on seven distinct areas of the city and is holding seven public meetings this week. Meeting dates and locations. Parking is perhaps the most important aspect of a city to get right if we are going to address traffic, make…
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There’s No Such Thing as a Free Parking Space
Following up on thoughts in the previous post about what is to be done about the Washington Metro… Here is a basic maxim to remember: If we want more people to avail themselves of shared ridership, be it commuter rail, bus, or shared ride-hailing services, they need to pay the full cost of their transportation…
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Asphalt City to Reform Parking Regs
The Old Town district in downtown Alexandria is the very model of Smart Growth — it was built during the golden age of urban development when city planners believed in such things as street grids, mixed uses, and urban densities. And in recent years, portions of Alexandria’s downtown have been re-developed according to the same…
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A Once-in-a-Century Opportunity to Get Transportation Right
by James A. Bacon Take the Uber revolution of summoning rides with a smart phone. Then add driverless cars, which eliminate the expense of paying someone to drive the car. Then overlay the emerging business model of Transportation As a Service, in which people pay for rides when they need them rather than buy cars that…
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The Invisible Parking Garage
by James A. Bacon It is axiomatic among New Urbanists and like-minded brethren in the Smart Growth movement that parking garages create dead space in the urban fabric that discourages walkability and depresses neighboring property values. Some architects try to dress up the structures by giving them facades that imitate the look of regular buildings, draping them…
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Anticipating the Demise of the Parking Meter
As the City of Charlottesville ponders an upgrade to its downtown parking technology (see “Paying for Onstreet Parking in Cville“), parking guru Bern Grush is looking two steps ahead and thinking about how municipalities should handle the inevitable demise of the parking meter. At some point in the foreseeable future, parking will be managed in…
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A Radical Notion: Paying for Onstreet Parking in Cville
Irony time: Virginia soon may get a test in market-based parking in… the People’s Republic of Charlottesville. The city would start charging for 800 on-street parking spaces downtown, now free, and install a system of smart traffic meters under a proposal advanced by Mark Brown, new owner of the Charlottesville Parking Center (CPC). The city reverted to a…
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Where the Parking Is Easy
San Francisco’s smart parking experiment — setting prices for on-street parking based on supply and demand — has brought lower average charges, made it easier to find a space and reduced parking-related anxiety. By James A. Bacon San Francisco has a reputation in many parts of the country as a bastion of left-wing politics. Haight-Ashbury…
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New Richmond Stadium Plan Deserves a Close Look
by James A. Bacon A private development team has offered to build a new Richmond baseball stadium on the Boulevard without taxpayer dollars, the Times-Dispatch reported Wednesday. The developers, who include Chesterfield County Supervisor Daniel A. Gecker, a principle with Urban Development Associates, has presented an overview to City Council and the Jones administration. “From…
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Roanoke Experiments with Paid Parking
by James A. Bacon In 1999 the City of Roanoke went socialist with its on-street parking downtown — it removed the last of its parking meters with the idea of making downtown more “hospitable” to visitors. Fifteen years later, city officials are planning to experiment with free markets and actually use price as a rationing…
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The High Cost of Free Parking
by James A. Bacon As parking guru Donald Shoup has long argued, there is a very high cost to “free” parking. Typically, those costs are hidden, so people are unaware that they exist. While Shoup’s theory is gaining traction among urban planners, particularly the smart growth set, it hasn’t caught on with the general public,…
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New Questions about the Shockoe Stadium Proposal
by James A. Bacon I’m heartened to see someone on the Richmond City Council ask tough questions about big headline-grabbing deals. Councilman Jon Baliles (son of the former governor) has raised substantive issues about Mayor Dwight Jones’ proposal to build a new baseball stadium for the Flying Squirrels in Shockoe Bottom. In particular, the analysis…
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Exposing the Black Friday Parking Myth
by James A. Bacon The Strong Towns blog has published a brilliant piece of crowd-sourced content on the topic of Black Friday parking. Here’s the issue: Smart Growth advocates are highly critical of local government regulations that mandate a minimum number of parking spaces around retail establishments. The resulting expanses of parking lots, they say,…
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The Quest for Smarter Parking
City Hall is trying to bring order and reason to the administration of downtown Richmond’s 24,000 parking spaces. The job could take years.