Photo by Brave Heart on Flickr.

This is the fourth of ten daily posts about why the Zoning Commission should approve the Office of Planning recommendations on off-street parking, leading up to the hearing on Thursday, July 31 at 6:30 pm. Please attend and testify if you can, or submit comments to the zoning commission in this thread.

Previously:

Today’s topic: On-street management tools, not parking minimums, are the right techniques to handle “spillover.”

We do not force new apartment buildings to provide cable television or Internet access, yet there aren’t legions of “neighborhood activists” fighting to require cable in all new buildings. Why? The only difference between parking and other amenities like cable and laundry is the concern about “spillover”—the idea that if we don’t build lots and lots of parking, new residents will park on the street, taking up spaces that existing residents are “entitled” to.

But our Residential Parking Permit system only barely works even today. In some areas, employees move their cars every two hours; in other areas, parking demand is mostly nights and weekends where drivers from outside DC can park for free and as long as they like anyway. Besides, even when cheap off-street spaces are available, drivers will take an on-street space if they can get one for the convnience.

As experiences from other cities show, the best policy is effective on-street management through performance parking techniques. DC is already refining an appropriate mix of on-street management techniques for our city through the pilot programs in Columbia Heights and around the Nationals ballpark.

Around the ballpark, the pilot has accomplished its goal. DC built a major traffic attractor and provided vastly less parking than 1950s zoning code writers believed possible, less than most other cities who have built new stadiums, and yet we have experienced no major problems. ANC 6D, the ANC in that area, even passed a resolution last month supporting the performance parking system and asking DDOT to keep it in force.

The news media have reported with the pilots, and those are being solved. On-street management gives us a wide range of tools; in time we will perfect a system that can work in every neighborhood where conditions warrant. No city that has tried performance parking has failed to reap significant rewards.

Our zoning code will last for another fifty years. We will identify the best on-street management systems within one or two, well in advance of potential new development with slightly reduced parking. We should not enshrine bad practices in zoning for half a century because of uncertainty about a system that already works here and is so successful in other cities.

Don’t forget to write comments for the Zoning Commission here and testify on the 31st. Every comment makes a difference!

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.