You Have All the Parking You Need—And It’s Hiding in Plain Sight

Communities far and wide believe that they have a parking problem. This concern generally ranks as a top problem voiced in public meetings and shows up in master plans and visioning documents. Lack of parking creeps in as an excuse for declining or stagnant economic growth, and the general solution comes in the form of hyper regulation through parking mandates, or through proposals of publicly subsidized parking lots or garage proposals. These proposals are giant leaps in the wrong direction, considering that parking solutions are hiding in plain sight.   

I recently was talking to one of my friends in South Carolina, who was trying to assist a very successful locally owned business in his community. The success of this business has resulted in the need for additional parking to accommodate weekend crowds that drive in from adjacent communities. The business is experiencing success, and so the need for additional parking is a great problem to have—but it’s a problem, nonetheless.

This community is not alone in jumping to the conclusion that the solution is for the city to clear a block and build a parking lot. This is what their city had done in the past, with the well-intentioned desire to encourage redevelopment, and to attempt to prevent a parking problem in the future. Without getting lost in the numbers, we can assume it cost a significant amount of money to construct the parking lot, probably took a lot of time to negotiate a land purchase, and resulted in a complex construction project. In short, they got an expensive project that inevitably will become a fiscal liability that’ll never pay for itself. 

The previously constructed parking lot is a nice parking lot with frontage on the main street, lots of plantings, and several public art pieces in the landscaping. However, the parking lot consumes 300 feet of frontage on the main street, which carries a decent amount of traffic. Although this parking lot provides 80 spaces, the parking lot occupies what could be 15,000 square feet of ground-floor development on the most visible street in the city—if not the region. The parking lot offers free parking, so this is a long-term fiscal liability for the city to maintain and manage.   

This is a problem that almost every city faces at some point in a redevelopment cycle, where parking becomes the political issue for which city staff have to present solutions. The orderly approach, and default solution, is to repeat the process of acquiring another parcel, remove all the buildings, and construct a new parking lot. We have all experienced rectangular parking lots, so the concept is simple, and most contracting or engineering firms can provide you a quick cost estimate. This approach is orderly and quick, which addresses political demand for action. 

However, these types of orderly systems are also very dumb. This orderly proposal requires the city to acquire and cannibalize the most productive areas in their community. The parking lot removes any development potential from the land, along with removing the property from the tax rolls. It is a wasteful use of land that could be so much more than just a parking lot.

It’s also a foolish approach, because in this city, there is already available parking hiding in plain sight—and the same principle goes for many other communities.

I would like to use this community as an example to highlight three locations where parking can be provided that could be easily implemented as a temporary project, and would cost the community almost nothing to implement.

Center Street

The existing street adjacent to this development is 32 feet wide, with two travel lanes and a sporadically painted shoulder and a sidewalk on one side of the street. The travel lanes range in width from 12 to 16 feet wide. This is a low volume street that is part of a historic street grid, and a street where people should be driving 25 mph or less. The block is approximately 575 feet from corner to corner. 

One observation—which can be confirmed with a humble tape measure—is that the pavement is wider than it needs to be to move cars. The next smallest step would be to correctly size the lanes and add on-street parking by converting the street to a yield street. A yield street is a roadway that serves bidirectional motor vehicle traffic without lane markings in the roadway travel area. The existing driveway spacings and hydrants on the street provide the opportunity for cars to pass at low speeds during peak parking demand. 

For this case, a yield street could be implemented with a power washer and gray spray paint, therein removing the remaining striping on this street. In a vacuum, 575 feet could yield a maximum total of 52 parallel parking spaces. To account for the reality of driveways or other obstructions, assume you yield 40% of that, or 20 new parking spaces. These spaces utilize existing pavement and could be delineated with paint or signs at a very low risk to the community and for almost no cost to the city. 

Another option is to formalize parallel parking on Center Street on one side of the street. The travel lanes on this street could be reduced from over 13 feet wide to 9–10 feet wide, which reinforces slower and safer speeds. The remaining pavement at the shoulders could be designated for parallel parking. If the parking is placed on the side of the street without a sidewalk, the remaining four-foot section of pavement could be utilized as a temporary sidewalk. This pattern of parking could alternate sides along the street to maximize parking and to maximize the accommodation for the pedestrian. 

This alternative of formalizing parallel on-street parking would require only a can of paint and a 4” paint roller to stripe the street. The city would then probably have to purchase a couple of parking signs to install. This modest project is, therefore, simple to implement and at little to no cost to the city.

Road Diet on Meeting Street

The parallel street—Meeting Street—one block to the north is the community’s main street. The street is striped with four lanes of traffic. According to South Carolina’s Department of Transportation, this street has historically carried an average of 12,000 trips a day. This is less than half the capacity to warrant 4 lanes of travel, and is more consistent with the trip count for a two-lane street. The additional two outer lanes are not necessary to carry the historic trips on this corridor and could be utilized for a more productive use. 

The street section and adjacent land uses are similar to Edgewater Drive in Orlando, Florida. In the early 2000s, the city worked with the Florida Department of Transportation to convert a very dangerous four-lane stroad into a more productive and safe street through a resurfacing project. The only difference between these two locations is that Edgewater Drive in Orlando carries almost double the car trips at 20,000 trips a day, compared to Meeting Street, which carries 12,000 trips per day. 

This type of roadway project that ultimately better utilizes the components of the street is described as a road diet, because with a little focus, the street can be transformed from an unsafe and over-built stroad, to a leaner and more productive street. This idea of removing lanes is counterintuitive to what we may believe. Note also that in the Edgewater Drive case study, a huge amount of economic development and growth resulted from the street transformation. This illustrates how a more productive street can support more productive land uses. 

The next smaller step for Meeting Street could be the conversion of the curb lane into on-street parallel parking. Initially, several temporary bump-outs and striping could be installed near the intersections. Just one block could yield 20 to 30 additional on-street parking spaces at almost no cost to the city. Over time, when the street is resurfaced or striped, these temporary conditions could be made permanent on this block and the process repeated along the corridor.

As these examples and suggestions show, your community doesn’t need to raze buildings and dump huge amounts of money into long-term liabilities like block-sized parking lots. Make use of what you already have, and try to find the resources in your place that are hiding in plain sight.

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