Every automobile trip starts and ends at a parking space. Parking is provided in a variety of contexts: on-street public parking, off-street public parking, private pay lots, and on-site parking for the residents, customers, and employees of private development. Most local governments set minimum parking requirements for every land use while providing free on-street parking at the same time. These requirements typically ensure that developers will provide enough spaces to satisfy the peak demand for free parking.
However, some local governments are adopting parking policies that help boost small businesses, promote housing development, and put people over parking.
For Auburn, Maine, it became clear that longstanding parking requirements were preventing the City from achieving its goals of infill development in urban areas and in evolving suburban areas for more mixed-use with shared parking resources. The implementation of mixed-use form-based codes in residential areas made this parking obstacle more visible. Eliminating commercial parking minimums and allowing residential uses to use proximate public parking resources to meet requirements has promoted infill development across the developed areas of the City.
The City of St. Mary’s, Pennsylvania, conducted a total re-write of its zoning ordinance in 2006, and specific provisions of the downtown commercial zoning district did not require off-street parking for new developments or changes in use. As a result of several developments within the downtown commercial zoning district, the ordinance was revised in 2019 to clarify that developer parking lots, if constructed, should be as small as possible and are exempt from the general parking lot requirements contained in the zoning ordinance for the central business district such as a minimum number of parking spaces. The success of this revision was due to several factors, not the least being persuading the governing body that a loosening of this restriction would not lead to parking chaos in the downtown area.
The question Traverse City wrestled with - But where will everyone park? reflects the decision Traverse City made decades ago eliminate parking requirements downtown to prevent the demolition of historic buildings in order to meet parking minimums. Despite the challenging times faced by many downtowns in the 1990's, Traverse City's downtown is a regional hub for retail, office, cultural, recreational and residential uses. The decision to eliminate parking requirements was paired with a plan to maximize land use by providing stacked parking in decks and repurposing existing surface lots for land uses of higher and better use. Additional steps that have recently been taken city-wide are to eliminate parking requirements for all residential uses and to impose parking maximums for many commercial uses. What they have found is that parking is still provided at a rate that is determined by the developer to adequately meet their needs while preventing large swaths of land dedicated to rarely used parking lots. Parking is always going to be a need, but by trying new approaches to addressing the need the city has been able to better balance other planning priorities.
This webinar will present three communities of different sizes that have eliminated parking minimums, whether downtown or throughout the community.
Speakers
- Eric Cousens, Director of Planning and Permitting, Auburn Maine
- Matthew Pfeufer, Zoning / Code Enforcement Officer, City of St. Mary, PA
- Shawn Winter, Planning Director, Traverse City, Michigan