The Northwest District has long been one of the most parking-constrained neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon. A dense and highly active mix of residential buildings, local retail, restaurants, and employment centers generates steady demand throughout the day and evening, placing sustained pressure on the curbside parking system.
In response, the City of Portland implemented an ambitious new parking management and parking planning strategy in 2016: a first-of-its-kind hybrid meter–permit district. This system combined paid on-street parking for visitors with residential and employee permits—an approach that was largely untested at the time and represented a significant shift in how curb space was managed in Northwest Portland.
Our team was engaged to lead a robust before-and-after parking study to evaluate the real-world impacts of this new system and to inform ongoing adjustments to rates, permits, and regulations. The study examined a large 600–block-face area and included detailed analysis of parking supply, occupancy, and turnover across different times of day and user groups.
A central focus of the work was understanding permit behavior in a hybrid environment. The analysis provided early, data-driven insights into how many permits should be issued, how permit pricing influenced demand, and how permit usage interacted with metered visitor parking. At a time when few cities had experience managing hybrid districts at scale, this study offered one of the first empirical looks at how these systems function in practice.
The findings helped the City calibrate permit caps and pricing, improve turnover for visitors and customers, and reduce long-term curbside storage, laying the groundwork for ongoing refinements to parking management in the Northwest District. More broadly, the project helped set the table for continued experimentation with hybrid parking systems and informed similar approaches elsewhere in Oregon and beyond.
Brian Davis led this work while in a previous position.