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.