Memorandum

City of Lawrence

City Manager’s Office

 

To:         Mayor and City Commission

             David L. Corliss, City Manager

From:    Eileen Horn, Sustainability Coordinator
             Scott McCullough, Director, Planning & Development Services  

Date:     June 7, 2013

 

Re:  Results of EPA Technical Assistance Grant

 

This spring, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) selected the City of Lawrence for a Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities technical assistance award. This technical assistance helped city and KU staff better understand the parking issues in the Oread Neighborhood.  The technical assistance included:

·       Use of a Parking Audit Tool, which staff used to inventory parking utilization in the Oread at both peak and non-peak times, to better understand the intensity and location of parking challenges.

·       A Parking Tools Workshop held on April 17, 2013.  EPA staff and consultants led stakeholders on a walk of the neighborhood and facilitated a series of workshop meetings to discuss the issues and opportunities related to reducing parking demand in the Oread.  Invited stakeholders included city and KU staff, elected and appointed officials, and neighborhood representatives.

·       An evening public meeting on April 17th shared the results of the day-long workshop with the general public, including many Oread residents.  Throughout the day, approximately 50 local community participants engaged in the activities.

The workshop discussions focused on ways the City, KU, and the Oread neighborhood can help meet residents’ transportation needs while relieving some of the pressure on the existing parking supply. Workshop participants and city staff identified three key takeaways from the audit results and workshop discussions.  Each of these strategies is elaborated in further detail in the “Next Steps Memorandum” provided by EPA:

o   First, supporting a variety of transportation options will reduce reliance on automobiles and, thus, the need for parking.  Improving sidewalk conditions, increasing transit access, and strategies to make the Oread a “complete neighborhood” (in which most of the essential services for residents are within a convenient distance), reduce the need to own a car.

 

o   Second, implementing a parking management program can help protect residents’ access to parking while achieving other neighborhood goals.  Parking in the Oread Neighborhood is currently unrestricted and free, which encourages both residents and non-residents to park on-street. To protect high-demand on-street parking for residents and discourage use by non-residents, many communities employ a residential parking permit (RPP) program that can includes two major layers of regulation.

 

The first layer is to implement parking time limits for on-street parking within a designated area. The second layer is to offer residential parking permits to residents of that designated area; the permits exempt their vehicle from the time restriction.

 

Creating an RPP program for the Oread neighborhood would require additional assessment of residents’ interest, current parking supply, and best locations and timeframes for enforcement.

 

o   Third, KU and its surrounding neighborhoods have a symbiotic relationship; improved collaboration will be essential to many of the potential solutions.  Policies, regulations, and incentive programs should be coordinated to achieve the desired, mutually-beneficial outcomes.

 

 A joint multimodal committee dedicated to mobility issues, with representatives similar to the stakeholder group gathered for this workshop, could be created to oversee and continue making progress on issues relating to parking and parking management.

 

 

Staff believes an appropriate next step would be to direct staff to form a committee of stakeholders from the city, KU, and the neighborhood to further pursue the strategies outlined above in order to recommend specific ways to address parking in the areas surrounding KU that currently may be deficient in terms of parking strategy.  The charge of the committee should include making specific recommendations on how a residential parking permit program could work and its boundaries, how transit could better serve the neighborhood, and how other modes of transportation could be bolstered to reduce vehicle trips.

 

Action Requested

Receive report and direct staff as appropriate.