As I wrap up parking plans for Forest Grove and Yachats—the former a city of 25,000 on the edge of the Portland metro area with a downtown that has started to pop in recent years, the latter a city of 1,000 on the Oregon Coast with a crush of seasonal demand—I can’t help but appreciate some similarities between processes and proposed solutions despite significant differences between the contexts and the issues.
At the outset of these projects, I think there was an impression among stakeholders and city staff that the solution to the parking woes was going to be to add extra supply, at a significant cost. But in both cases, our data and outreach painted a consistent and clear picture: While there was often a crush of demand in the busiest lots and streets, there was plenty of available parking immediately outside of these areas, typically within a block or two of key destinations.
This hammers home one of my favorite talking points about parking planning: Parking planning, at its core, is a simple and intuitive three-step process:
1. Identify where the problem is.
2. Identify where the problem isn’t.
3. Figure out some clever ways to move demand from (1) to (2).
This isn’t to say that the process is without nuance. For starters, understanding why the problem is where it is and isn’t where it isn’t can be an artform all its own. Developing that understanding requires a boots-on-the-ground presence that frankly I think a lot of the big consultants won’t do or can’t get to pencil, but it’s precisely the secret sauce that leads to an effective and broadly supported parking plan.
Of course, there are certainly some cases where the problem does indeed encompass entire neighborhoods, in which case it’s necessary to get creative with pricing and permitting structures. These situations are probably most common in bigger cities—certainly we saw this in our work in Portland and Charlotte—but certainly not limited to them, with the Bayfront in Newport, Oregon serving as a textbook example of a smaller city district where metering is warranted.
But, for many smaller cities, suburbs, and resort towns, you can usually find some parking that’s well-located but underutilized, and conjure up some low-cost, high-impact interventions to help activate it. I’m proud of the creative and well-received packages of ideas we presented to Forest Grove and Yachats over the last few months, and look forward to seeing them in action. Best of all, we learn a little bit more every time we do one of these plans, and I can’t wait to apply these lessons in our next round of projects.