Hybrid Residential Parking Districts

Hybrid Residential Parking Districts

By Steven Bergin, CAPP

The City of Richmond has six restricted residential parking districts (RRPD), each with their own unique program that allows residents to purchase permits to park freely in their district. Most of our parking districts were established due to parking pressures from their neighboring university, Virginia Commonwealth University. Last year, the City of Richmond eliminated parking minimum requirements for businesses, and while not all of our RRPDs have retail, commercial, and/or restaurant businesses in the heart of their districts, three do. This has brought up concerns for both residents and businesses alike – is it time for the city to investigate a hybrid district parking program model?

Currently, only residents qualify for parking permits in all of our RRPDs. This is not a new challenge, but with parking at a premium, how do we encourage businesses to thrive while also ensuring sufficient parking for residents. Our district associations are having this conversation now and the city is hoping to help.

With no consensus yet on how best to approach the issue, I researched to see if other municipalities had programs that allowed business parking. Since I hadn’t heard of any, to my surprise I did find more than I expected – a variety of programs that offered unique permits, with different methods of calculating the number of permits allowed. Not just business employees were accommodated – school staff, group home staff, landlords, contractors, nannies, home health care providers, and even employees working in businesses that abut an RRPD. I expected to see some of these but a couple I did not.

Not surprising was that the annual fees were mostly flat fees, not tiered or limited to an established number per business. I ran across one that calculated the number of permits allowed by square footage of the business – similar to the calculation used to determine parking minimums for businesses.

After sharing my research with one of our district associations that has shown support for business permits and their councilmember, we landed on a simple solution whereby businesses would be allowed two vehicle permits for $25.00 a piece, and six visitor placards for $35.00 a piece. The ordinance to create this permit program in the Carver RRPD is currently being drafted by the city legal department and should be going to council in the near future.

Meanwhile the City of Richmond has contracted with a vendor to develope a hybrid parking permit model. The focus of the study is to talk with the RRPDs, develop a program that would work for all districts, and to identify all existing ordinances that would need modification to bring the program to existence. It will be interesting to see how close it will be to our pilot program with Carver.

Steven Bergin, CAPP, is an Operation Manager for the City of Richmond, Virginia. You can reach Steven at Steven.Bergin@RVA.gov.