What's a Parking Benefits District? DNA needs to pay more attention to matters that pertain to merchants.

Yesterday Jeff Speck tweeted a thread briefly explaining Rule 19 from his new book, Walkable City Rules.

Yesterday I read this thread just after attending Develop New Albany's monthly merchant meeting, where a guest speaker discussed wealth management in the context of family-run independent businesses.

I appreciated his efforts, while at the same time shaking my head in disappointment. Downtown merchants should be discussing matters precisely like Speck's "Parking Benefits District" thread.

Aren’t topics like parking more relevant than wealth management to merchants in the here and now?

It remains that business owners have invested FAR MORE downtown than the city. Shouldn't they be part of the city's prospective solutions -- if any?

City Hall is fond of dictating from above. This process needs to be reversed.

How about it, DNA? Isn't that what you're here for?

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Probably the most effective Parking Benefits District is the one that Donald Shoup helped establish in Old Town Pasadena. Begun in 1993, it paid for all of the benefits mentioned above, as well as a team of public service officers, the burying of overhead wires, and the conversion of a rear alley network into a lovely pedestrian zone. There are no dumpsters in Old Town; each block has its own industrial trash compactor.

The experience in Pasadena has been truly transformative: a virtuous circle in which improvement has led to more visitors which has led to more meter revenue and more improvement. Within five years of its inception, property tax revenue from the district tripled and sales tax revenues quadrupled. Clearly, this is an effort worth copying.

RULE 19: Re-price parking with an eye to Shoup’s 85% rule, and establish a Parking Benefits District to direct revenue toward local improvements. From #WalkableCityRules

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I've chosen a random on-line reference as an additional overview.

Parking management is an issue often overlooked in a city’s development plan. While it may seem like a secondary concern in the quest for economic development, parking management directly impacts accessibility to businesses, customer willingness to travel to certain areas, and the quality of life experienced by residents.

Current parking practices tend to favor generous parking supply at free or minimal cost which has unintended and undesirable consequences. Higher development costs, higher prices for goods and services, sprawl, and increased automobile travel leading to more traffic congestion, roadway costs, crashes and pollution emissions are just a few of the unwanted effects of free or cheap parking.

Several cities across the country have begun implementing alternative parking management strategies to ensure more convenient curbside on-street parking through better pricing. A Parking Benefit District (PBD) is an emerging strategy that uses better pricing to reduce the negative effects of parking and reinvests the increased revenue into improving the area streets and sidewalks.

"Ideas worth stealing: Parking benefit districts."

Or, we could institute sidewalk double parking.

Each month downtown merchants gather, and parking is always a topic of conversation. The odd part is that we haven't much of a parking problem, apart from business owners and their employees monopolizing curbside spaces that should turn over according to demand from all users.

Consequently, it comes down to one of three potential "solutions."

• Merchants police themselves.
• The city policies the spaces by enforcing its own code.
• We use parking meters to regulate turnover.

Yet again, there seem to be any number of opinions, but little will to examine underlying realities as a means of understanding the issue.

I'd encourage all downtown stakeholders to at least familiarize themselves with the potential usefulness of a parking benefit district, as described here (and on numerous previous occasions).

The most important thing to remember is that this or any other City Hall will take no action unless "encouraged" to do so. Political entities prefer the status quo, and the votes they know. Unity and collective will can influence this situation.

Ideas worth stealing: Parking benefit districts, by Jon Geeting (Keystone Crossroads)

As UCLA professor Donald Shoup explained in his cult parking economics tome "The High Cost of Free Parking," some cities and downtown business associations have discovered that it's much easier, politically speaking, to introduce new parking meters or permits when the impacted areas are allowed to keep some of the revenue generated within the neighborhood to pay for extra public improvements and services.

The prospect of a dedicated, ongoing local revenue stream for neighborhood projects becomes enticing enough to residents and businesses, and they become a countervailing force in support of parking meters.

Those public improvements in turn attract even more visitors, which generates more parking revenue in a virtuous cycle of redevelopment.

In different cities, Parking Benefit Districts (PBDs) come in different shapes and sizes, but what they all have in common is that they fund visible local public improvements in the places where the revenue is raised.