Back on May 16th, at long last, the Carrboro Town Council held a discussion about whether to remove parking requirements in Carrboro. As the Town Council finished its discussion, the schedule for next steps included bringing a revised draft of a parking proposal to the Town Council on June 20th. This did not happen; there were no parking policy items on the June 20th agenda.

In an effort to move the community discussion forward at a faster rate, I and another community member with professional urban planning expertise made an attempt at drafting alternative text that would convert parking minimums to parking maximums in Carrboro.

This is a DRAFT and is surely imperfect. However, it does attempt to:

• Convert all minimums in the parking table to maximums, for all uses in Carrboro. For all but two uses, we did not change any quantity of parking listed in the table. The two where it was hard to write a maximum without expressing a number have the comment “qualitative adjustment”
  • Use a 1/2-mile buffer around the Chapel Hill Transit Short Range Plan services that operate five days per week as the “Transit Parking Area” where the change can be activated
  • Leave space for zoning district-driven triggers for parking maximums. However, we left this section of the code empty, as it appears commercial parking changes may be handled through a different process.
  • Address the possibility of car-share services such as Zipcar being allocated spaces outside of the standard parking maximums.

My anonymous colleague and I hope these are useful to the Town.

PDF Version: Carrboro Parking Maximum Text Draft-6-22-2023