Free (up) parking

COEUR d’ALENE — A new downtown parking study has been completed revealing many deficiencies that will need to be addressed to make the system more efficient.

Annaka Norris, project manager for Rich and Associates, presented her findings to the city council Tuesday evening after updating the city’s 2007-08 parking study.

“The biggest purpose of the study is to quantify the parking demand downtown,” said City Finance Director Troy Tymesen, adding the study confirmed the need for a new downtown parking structure.

Tymesen said ignite cda paid for the study because the urban renewal agency has plans to build a new parking structure, and the agency wanted to confirm there is still a demand for it.

Norris said the study did confirm that, but the update also revealed the city needs to add more “city owned” parking spaces, do a better job communicating its parking policies, and add infrastructure to modernize its enforcement efforts to make downtown more parking friendly for shoppers and tourists.

The first thing Norris pointed out is that the city doesn’t control enough of the parking supply.

“Based on Rich and Associates’ experience and best practices, we have found it desirable for the city to have control of at least 50 percent of the parking supply,” she said. “This allows for an effective management of parking in terms of allocation changing demand and market pricing. The city doesn’t meet this benchmark.”

Of the 4,476 parking spaces that exist in the study area, the city only controls 1,823.

“Where the city controls and manages a majority of the parking downtown, it helps you control where new development goes,” Norris said, adding the city needs to discourage any new private commercial parking downtown. “A lot of people use the missing tooth analogy: you have a really nice development with a dense block, and then in the middle of it is a parking lot where you could have had development that brings in tax dollars.”

Norris said when the city owns the parking, officials can decide where the parking goes, which allows the city to create a more dense downtown core. It also allows the city to be more proactive in attracting new land uses downtown.

What was studied

Rich and Associates modeled the parking in downtown and the surrounding area to determine if the city’s parking supply was adequate to meet the current demand. The company went block-by-block taking a building inventory, analyzing what types of businesses occupy those buildings and what kind of parking demand those businesses create.

Then the company took a hard look at the number of parking spaces surrounding each block to determine where deficiencies exist. Overall Norris said she found a surplus of 462 parking spaces in the downtown core and surrounding areas, but when looking at the downtown core itself she found a deficiency of 221 spaces during the peak summer tourist season.

“Overall the study showed that if people were willing to walk, we have plenty of parking,” Tymesen said, adding that unfortunately people are not willing to walk a distance to get downtown.

Both Norris and Tymesen said shuttling people downtown doesn’t work either. Tymesen said the city tried shuttling people downtown during the McEuen Park construction but they eventually just shut it down because very few people were using it.

Norris told the council the surplus parking in the surrounding areas of downtown was considered to be too far away to accommodate shoppers and tourists who want to enjoy the amenities of the downtown business community.

She said her company modeled a future forecast — based on known developments planned for downtown — and found that in five years the deficit is going to grow to 290 spaces and in 10 years the deficit grows to 350 spaces.

“So what do we do to fix this? What do we do to make the parking system more efficient with the parking we have and what we have planned for future parking?” she asked, before laying out some recommendations.

Fixing the problem

Norris said her first recommendation was to market downtown parking more effectively.

“You have to let employees and customers know where they can park every day,” she said. “But it also allows you to add an education component.”

Norris told the council education is key to helping employees understand that parking farther away from downtown frees up parking for customers and visitors.

“We want on-street parking to turn over,” she said, suggesting the city should produce a brochure to explain parking rules and where the most convenient parking is located in the downtown core.

“You need to tell day visitors where they can park all day,” she said, adding the brochure should replace all other parking related materials in downtown.

Norris suggested putting the same brochure online, as well as in retail stores and restaurants. She said parking enforcement agents should also be carrying the brochures to hand out to tourists.

Norris said the city also needs to formally plan for special events and use sandwich board signs and fliers to direct event participants to the proper parking venues.

“There is no need to build additional parking for events,” she told the council. “You just need to plan for special events.”

Norris suggested having parking ambassadors on hand during events to direct traffic, and also said employees should know where they are allowed to park during the events.

Norris said the city’s parking signage is also lacking.

“If I can’t figure out where to park as a visitor to downtown, I might not stay downtown,” she said.

Norris said Coeur d’Alene needs “a family of signs” that serve different purposes. First, she said the city needs directional location signs that point out where public parking exists. They also need simple to read instructional signs that tell visitors how to pay for parking “and some basic rules like no overnight parking.”

Wayfinding signs that point to parking and other downtown amenities are also needed for both drivers and pedestrians.

“These signs need to have simple messages that can be read as the parker drives by,” Norris said.

Enforcement is important

Furthermore, she said, the city needs to invest in at least five more electronic pay stations for the McEuen parking structure alone. Norris said those machines cost about $6,500 each, but they can be used much more than they are currently.

Norris said a simple and cost-effective software conversion would allow visitors to pay for parking by entering their license plate number and pay by credit card. In fact, she recommended the city go toward a full license plate recognition system to manage both on-street and lot parking.

Tymesen said the city will have to work toward a system like that because of the expense involved.

Norris said with an updated license plate recognition system, employees could purchase downtown parking permits online. However, Norris said if the city was to convert the system, it should plan to have parking ambassadors on hand to help visitors and employees through the transition.

“You have to budget money to have someone out there at least for the first two or three weeks,” she said. “There is nothing worse than losing a customer downtown because they couldn’t figure out the parking or how it works.”

Norris said the license plate recognition system could also help with parking enforcement. To enforce parking rules, Norris said the city needs one parking attendant for every 650-800 parking spaces. In Coeur d’Alene, she recommends at least two part-time enforcement officers, and three during the summer months.

Norris also said the parking officers need to change up their enforcement routes, so people who are gaming the two-hour free parking system can’t shuffle from space to space.

“They need to use different routes that are not routine, so a pattern doesn’t develop,” Norris said, explaining employees watch for those patterns and take advantage of that. “Employees are going out and wiping the chalk off their tires. It’s important to have different routes.”

Norris said making better use of the handheld ticket writers — by entering in license plate numbers to track parkers throughout the day — would prevent these efforts to game the system.

“It helps to see where people are shuffling, or moving their cars every two hours,” she said. “It can also help track repeat offenders, which is key.”

She said a progressive fine system is needed to crack down on repeat offenders. Norris said other cities set a time frame of six months and the first ticket within that timeframe should be a warning.

The second ticket in six months could be $15, the third $20, the fourth $25 and the fifth $40.

“What this helps you do is keep your employees and business owners off the street and parking in the right spaces,” she said. “We’ve talked in some of our stakeholder meetings about the-carrot-and-the-stick theories and unfortunately the stick tends to work a little better with parking.”

Tymesen said the carrot is also working. Just this year the Coeur d’Alene Downtown Association began selling $20 monthly parking passes to downtown employees if they agree to park in the McEuen Parking Garage.

“We are already seeing some success with that,” he said. “On-street parking is very, very valuable to gross sales.”

Tymesen said last year the city sold 87 parking permits in the month of May, but in May 2016 the city already has sold 147 permits.

Norris suggested putting all parking fine revenue into a parking maintenance account to make the parking program self-sustaining. She said the city should budget at least $25 per parking space a year for maintenance.

A new parking structure

Norris also recommended building more parking infrastructure downtown, and said her model shows the best place to put that parking is on block number 12, which sits between Third and Fourth streets and Lakeside and Coeur d’Alene avenues.

“There has been a lot of talk about developers are walking away from downtown due to lack of parking,” Norris said, adding block 12 is where ignitecda is planning to erect a parking structure. “Lot 12 was determined in the last study to be a good location for a parking structure and that still remains true because of the amount of vacant buildings in that area.”

Tony Berns, executive director for ignitecda, said ignite has earmarked about $2 million for the construction of a parking garage at that location, but is not sure when the project will get underway.

"We have been waiting for the parking study to get a third party to validate the need for the structure," Berns said, adding the consultant concluded there is a deficit and validated the location of the parking garage.

Berns said with the parking deficit and some of the redevelopment going on in downtown, he would expect the project to begin "sooner rather than later."

Berns said the next step for ignitecda is to decide what type of parking garage they would like to build. He aid the agency could build just a standard parking garage, or a mixed use parking garage with retail on the ground level, or residential or office on the upper floors.

"Depending on what we decide to build, that $2 million number might get worked around a bit," he said.