Comments for Second Public Hearing on Library Site at 203 S Greensboro St

I sent some comments to the Carrboro Board of Aldermen this evening for tonight’s public hearing. Sorry for not formatting them better, but time was short! Here they are:


First, I appreciate Mr. Spencer’s efforts to capture what was heard last time- I think he got much of the input from the public captured well, and better still- I see it expressed in the new material he created.

Here are my reactions:

1.    On the north side of the block, fronting Roberson Street, remove the drop-off lane. Drop-off-pickup lanes are generally a suburban construct so that traffic can keep moving at high speed. That should not be a purpose that is encouraged on Roberson. Drop-off and pick-up in the urban context should happen at the curb, and these movements help to calm traffic. Removing this zone allows for the extension of the sidewalk to the entrance to the underground parking.

2.    Carrboro has a chance to do real street trees here. If the trees are against the building on Roberson, they do not act as effectively as a traffic control device, and provide less shade in summer. Put the sidewalk between the trees and the building, and it will be easier to look into what I hope will be big windows into the library, while providing more shade for people using the sidewalk.

3.    The parking underground cites 88 spaces per underground tier. I think the project can function with two parking tiers, or even one, meaning either 88 spaces or 176. I suggest dedicating less than 20 spaces to Town Use and leaving the rest as public parking which would be Shared, Managed, Unbundled, and Paid. I talked about what each of these mean in my prior comments.

https://citybeautiful21.com/2017/09/19/development-at-203-s-greensboro-needs-less-parking-startup-space-to-complement-library/

4.    The remote parking options continue to replicate the primary problem with how “parking” issues have been addressed in downtown Carrboro for years, which is the thought that there will need to be parking built, and that it should be a public deck. We ***MUST*** get beyond this limiting mindset and think about DISTRICT parking downtown where public and private lots contribute spaces to a PUBLIC PARKING DISTRICT.

What does this look like? Let’s say you do a one tier underground parking facility at 203 S Greensboro. 15 spaces reserved for the town, the remaining 73 are public. They get added to the Public Parking District. At any time when those 73 spaces are less than 85% full, it is free to park. When those spaces are more than 85% full, a price is added to help free up some spaces. This gets managed with smart parking apps like those in Chapel Hill, Asheville, and Durham.

How do we add private spaces to the Public Parking District? The parking study clearly shows that one of the emptiest lots in all of downtown is the Bank of America lot, right next to 203 S Greensboro. The Town, having set up the Public Parking District, approaches Bank of America and says: “We see you have 35 spaces that are mostly unused during the lunch crush time for restaurants. We have set up a software-managed Public Parking District. We invite you to put ten spaces into the Public Parking District, keeping 25 for yourself. They will be priced to keep them 15% empty. At times of day when they are 15% empty without charging, they will be free. For participating, after covering the cost of managing the system, the Town of Carrboro will provide some of the revenue received from pricing back to your business, and some of the revenue will go to the town to help fund access projects to downtown Carrboro, including Parking Signage and lighting, wayfinding, bike and sidewalk projects, and additional bus service.”

Once you have 10 spaces there, you approach another business- perhaps the lot owned by the folks who own the Clean Machine building. You add the Century Center Lot to the Public Parking District as well, running on the same rules. You keep going from business to business, and others will join. You will *FIND* additional parking it by freeing it from those private lots. Businesses who are open 9 to 5 can elect only to participate after 5:30 pm. Bars that open at 11 am can elect only to participate to 10:30 am.

This is going to cost orders of magnitude less than additional parking construction, and perhaps bring the Town and businesses revenue. It also means that someone in a minivan with 3 kids driving from Lake Hogan Farms who wants to park at 203 S Greensboro will *ALWAYS* find a space. That’s what pricing does. If you’re that parent, are you willing to pay $1.25 to have a convenient, easy place to park to take your kids into the library? If they can pay by smartphone app, the answer is definitely “YES.”

So let’s stop trying to site decks, and work on freeing private spaces by becoming the leader of a downtown Public Parking District, and invite private partners to join.

5.    In terms of the site layout Jim Spencer has created with the space to walk between the buildings, consider whether an upper floor connection for the levels above the ground makes sense. This could provide a sense of enclosure to the space and also make it easier for employees to move around.

6.    We’re trying to do economic development, right? Then this building should be five stories. The Level 3 floorplate should be replicated on Level 4, and again on a 5th level. We only have one downtown, and if we are tapering building height to transition to residents on the south side of Carr Street, we are literally reducing the economic capacity of Carrboro’s (population: 20k plus) most productive real estate to honor the theoretical aesthetic concerns of maybe 10-12 people. Folks who live next to downtown should be prepared for the buildings to get taller over time, and to their credit- those who spoke from the Carr Street neighborhood at the meeting seemed to understand this.


 

The Future of Parking Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed

I’ve never read William Gibson’s novels, and I am generally unfamiliar with his ideas.  But I like this quote of his:

The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.

This is true to some degree with any matter of human existence that interfaces with technology, and transportation, including parking– is no different.

Our family spent Easter weekend in Asheville, NC. DW grew up there and whenever we visit, we usually spend some time (or lots of time) enjoying all that Asheville’s downtown has to offer. The transformation of downtown into what is perhaps North Carolina’s most vibrant urban environment since the mid-90s is quite remarkable, and we enjoy seeing the changes there when we visit.

Given the amount of time I have spent writing on this blog about parking recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see that at least some elements of the Future of Parking have arrived in Asheville.

Most notably, Asheville has implemented pay-by-phone parking across many (but curiously not all) spaces in downtown.  Here’s how it works:

1. After you find a parking space, you get out of your car and make a choice between putting quarters, nickels and dimes into a conventional parking meter adjacent to your space, or paying for use of the space with your smartphone.  Signage on the street near public parking spaces lets you know what zone you are in.

 

Parking Zone Signage in Asheville

Parking Zone Signage in Asheville

2. Once you know your zone, you can fire up an app on a smartphone, text, or call an operator via phone to pay.  The remainder of the steps below are showing the smartphone procedure.  You look at the space number on the parking meter (in this case, 3) to enter into the software.

Asheville Parking Meter

Asheville Parking Meter, Space 3

3. From here the phone app takes over.  I had downloaded the Passport Parking app and registered my phone and credit card number.  Once you sign in using a pin you designate, you specify the zone (which part of the city) you are renting a space in.

Choosing Your Parking Zone

Choosing Your Parking Zone

4. Next you specify the parking space itself: (I also parked once in space 17, and space 18. I forgot to get a screenshot for space 3, but you get the idea)

Choose Parking Space Screen

Choose Parking Space Screen

5. Finally, you receive a screen where you can select how many hours and minutes you want, which then gives you a summary and your total anticipated parking charge:

Confirm Payment Screen

Confirm Payment Screen

 

You’ll notice that you’re paying $0.25 extra to pay for parking via phone, on top of a base price of $1.25 for 75 minutes, or a quarter for every 15 minutes. Is this surcharge worth it?  Imagine you’re at a restaurant, having a good time with friends, and you realize it’s 3 minutes until the meter runs out, and the restaurant is 5 minutes away on foot.  And it’s raining. Would you rather sprint back to the car to feed the meter $0.50, or reach into your pocket, tap your phone a few times, and extend your parking by 30 minutes for $0.75?

It’s this ability to change your plans on the fly and still avoid a ticket or a backtracking walk across downtown that makes the service worth the extra quarter.

6. Finally, the app even gives you the option to be reminded when you’re getting down to a certain number of minutes so that you know when to start walking back to your car, or to make the extension payment and keep on doing what you were doing.

Parking Countdown

Parking Countdown

Notice the option to Extend your parking is at the bottom left, and Validation (I did not get to try this in Asheville) is at the right.

The system emails or texts you a receipt if you like, so if you’re on business and need to turn such things in, it’s easy to do so.  All in all, I found it very convenient, and the system did what it was supposed to do.

Opportunities for Improvement

Asheville could make this system a little better with a few simple improvements.

  • First, the meter poles are labeled, but many of the meter poles manage parking for two spaces.  There’s some confusion on the two-space poles which space number you should enter into the system. It’s less confusing for the user if every space on the street is individually marked.
  • Market pricing of spaces.  It was clear driving around that some spaces were in much greater demand, yet the price was uniform as far as I could tell across most zones.  Raising prices on busier blocks and lowering them on less-busy blocks would lead to better utilization on the further-away blocks and also make more spaces available on the best blocks.
  • Finally, I’m not sure what the significance of the Zone numbers were.  I expected zones to change by block, but it seemed like two-thirds of downtown was in Zone 48, and the rest of the zones seemed haphazard.  I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to be telling me. Perhaps using more zones would have made things clearer; perhaps not.

The Bottom Line

As I mentioned above, the future of parking is already arriving piecemeal in North Carolina, though it has not yet reached Carrboro. Asheville is using pay-by-smartphone technology effectively, but has not improved its hardware (meters and labels) or policy (pricing/rates) to keep up with its advanced software.  Hopefully those improvements will come soon.

The type of advanced parking system I think we ultimately will need in Carrboro involves several improvements over the status quo, and the type of software implementation shown here, already working well in Asheville, is one element of that advanced parking system.