Uptown Charlotte is one of the fastest-growing urban cores in the United States. Yet when this parking planning project began, the city had one of the lowest on-street meter rates in the country: just $1 per hour. Our team was engaged to conduct a comprehensive parking supply and demand analysis for Uptown Charlotte, North Carolina, testing the effectiveness of that rate and examining broader parking usage patterns and management impacts.
This project represented my largest parking data collection effort to date. Our team observed approximately 2,600 on-street parking spaces once per hour for 15 hours per day over three days—totaling more than 117,000 individual observations. We walked roughly 1,300 miles in the process. The findings were clear: in a downtown as active and economically vibrant as Uptown Charlotte, $1-per-hour parking was simply too good of a deal.
Critically, the low on-street rate undercut nearby privately operated parking decks, placing disproportionate pressure on curbside parking and overburdening the street system. On Saturdays—when all on-street parking was free—demand was consistently sky-high throughout the day, accompanied by the familiar symptoms of unmanaged parking: circling, congestion, and long-term vehicle storage. The conditions served as a textbook example of how free parking in high-demand downtowns benefits very few users, typically those who arrive early and occupy prime spaces all day.
While we never recommend a parking rate increase lightly, this parking planning study demonstrated that higher prices—and expanded paid hours—were clearly necessary. Just as importantly, the analysis showed that charging for parking on Saturdays was essential to effective downtown parking management. On July 1, 2022 Charlotte raised meter rates to $1.50/hour and began to charge for street parking on Saturdays on September 10, 2022.
Brian Davis led this work while in a previous position.
