Kitty Pozer Park Plan Should Make Room for On-Street Parking

At Tuesday’s council meeting, we got a first look at the concept plan for the expanded Kitty Pozer Park as designed by AECOM, the landscape architecture consultant hired to finalize the design.  The plan presented was simple and conceptual; so conceptual that it doesn’t provide much more detail than the Concept H plan developed by the city a few months ago.  Council members had a few concerns about the parking layout and some minor design issues but with the level of detail given, it would be difficult to provide much more feedback than that.

To me, the biggest issue, which impacts the downtown area as a whole, is the lack of consideration for on-street parking.  The idea for including on-street parking with the project came from local businesses after it was decided that the park project would remove the gravel parking lot at University Drive and North Street.   The proposal was to add on-street parking to northbound University Drive and eastbound North Street.  When presented with the idea back in February, most council members were warm to it. 

There are numerous benefits to local businesses and downtown as a whole that can come from adding just a few on-street parking spaces to the Kitty Pozer block.  Here are a few that come to mind. 

1. It would bring more parking spaces closer to the core business community, which his primarily to the west and south of the site.
2. Parking spaces would be easily accessible and readily visible.  Many businesses complain that although there is a good deal of parking downtown, it is difficult for first time visitors to find it.
3. On-street parking provides a buffer between the street and the sidewalk, making the sidewalk safer and more comfortable for pedestrians.  It would do the same for the expanded park and plaza.  In fact, AECOM suggested a design scheme that adds a second sidewalk behind a barrier wall along North Street because the sidewalk there is so unbearable to pedestrians.
4. On-street parking encourages drivers to slow down.  It is pretty obvious that speeding is a problem downtown.  This is to be expected since most downtown streets are actually commuter thoroughfares.  The best way to control speeds is to design roads to discourage speeding.  One tool to accomplish this is with on-street parking.  Drivers have been shown to decrease speeds on streets with on-street parking because they intuitively expect sudden stopping and more pedestrian activity.

With so many potential benefits to the park and downtown as a whole, it was disappointing to see that on-street parking wasn’t even considered in the concept plan presented by AECOM even though it is supported by downtown businesses and sparked an interest with city council.  At Tuesday’s meeting, council members Drummond and Stombres both asked whether on-street parking was considered to which city staff responded that it was presented as an option to AECOM, who ultimately did not include it in the plan.

Admittedly, there are some potential issues that on-street parking could create in this area that should be studied before making a final call. 

For one, the space needed for the parking would be taken from space for the park.  In my mind, this is a moot point, because the nature of the two bounding streets is so unpleasant that the eight to ten foot setback required for a parking lane would be undesirable as park space anyway.  With the parking lane present, the park space would be more usable right up to the edge.  So we would have less designated park space, but potentially more usable park space.

Second, there could be safety issues with people attempting to parallel park on a heavily traveled street such as North Street.  There are plenty of streets with just as much traffic volume as North Street that have on-street parking, but the fact that this would be a single block of on-street parking on a street that otherwise doesn’t have it could be a concern.  In the long term, we should strive to add more on-street parking downtown so this won’t be an isolated situation.  But in the short term, a traffic engineer should be consulted to make sure there wouldn’t be any operational hazards with on-street parking on this block.

Despite the uncertainties, the design team seems to be ignoring the potential benefits of on-street parking on the Kitty Pozer block.  It would be a mistake to move forward without considering the benefits to the park, local businesses, and downtown as a whole.