In the second piece on the question of lifting the Winter Parking Ban permanently, Watertown City Manager George Proakis focused on the impact on City operations and possible unintended consequences. See the piece sent out by the City below,
Recently, a group of Watertown residents signed a petition to seek a public hearing in front of the City Council. The topic of the petition and the hearing was our long-term ban on overnight parking that we enforce each winter. The Council hosted this hearing in January.
Our winter parking ban requires individuals who have a car and a driveway to ensure their car is in their driveway or garage each night. Most residents meet the requirements of the ban by relying on their own driveway, garage or apartment building parking lot. Many who shared their experience at the public hearing don’t have their own driveway to park at night. Some rent a parking space in neighboring driveways and lots. Others rely on the 900 public parking spaces that we offer to residents who have no other places to park. For some, these spaces are inconvenient, requiring longer walks to and from their cars. We also require them to move their cars out of these lots early, as these lots are needed each day for City and school uses. In a city with 24,154 registered vehicles, we estimate based on the lot usage that less than 500 of them rely on our lots for offsite parking during the winter ban. But, for those with a car and without convenient off-street parking, the ban creates many daily challenges.
Last week, in the first installment of a group of editorials on this topic, I discussed the public safety reasons for the ban, and potential public safety impacts of this ban. Today, I want to focus on the city operational impacts of the ban and the unintended consequences that might result from removing such a ban.
Next week – in a third installment – I will cover the long-range planning impacts of the ban.
Parking policy is an extremely complicated issue; once you begin to unpack that system, and repack the system in a different way, it suddenly doesn’t all fit again. The main questions at the center of parking policy are “How do we view the public curb on your street? And how do we use it?” While these may sound like simple questions, there is a complexity associated with the answer.
As we look outside of Watertown at communities with similar or greater density, we see cities and towns with either more strict parking restrictions – like the year-round on-street ban in Brookline and Arlington – or the complex permitting systems like those that exist in Somerville, Cambridge, and Boston.
I experienced the parking enforcement operation firsthand in Somerville, where I worked in the City Planning department for twelve years. Somerville had parking control officers working on shifts that covered every hour of every day. They had staff to issue permits, manage appeals and collect payments. They had a fleet of contractors with tow trucks. For snow emergencies, they had a system of blue lights on street corners that notified the community when they were in effect. Somerville has a parking department with an annual budget in excess of $4 million. This ensured that the common curb space was reserved for residents, managed well, and (at least on one side of the street) clear during a snowstorm.
In Watertown, we operate our parking operations with four overnight police officers enforcing the winter ban and two daytime parking control officers enforcing other parking violations. We do not have the current capacity to operate a similar system, nor do we have a budget in the immediate or near future to build that capacity here in Watertown. Even with such a system in place, Somerville’s setup had very low incentive not to overuse the parking resources. The cost of an annual permit for a Somerville resident is $40. The department’s costs are mainly covered by parking fines. For Watertown to build a system like Somerville’s, there would need to be a fee and fine program that could support the department that we’d need.
Developing such a system would require more testing, analysis, and many conversations within the community. But, eliminating the ban without creating a system to replace it can create many unintended consequences. Giving away this curb space for free for anybody to use every day and evening is not a “best practice” for a municipality like Watertown. If we eliminate the parking ban and do not put something else in its place, what we end with is a “tragedy of the commons”- a risky practice and cautionary tale of giving away a finite common good. In Garret Hardin’s 1968 essay on this topic, he tells the story of residents who were allowed to graze their sheep for free on a shared common pasture. What then happened was that all the residents decided to get sheep, who all grazed for free on the common. Eventually, the grass on the common died. What the community was left with was no grass for their sheep and a depleted common space that nobody could use for their sheep. If we view our curb space as a common good, giving away that space without any regulation or cost, our own resource will be depleted. More people could buy and use more cars, filling up more space making it even harder to park on our streets. In Watertown, the winter parking ban is the only limit we place on free street space, and we only enforce it for a few months out of the year.
When applied to free year-round parking, this “tragedy” has many unintended impacts. One consequence could be that more residents of our surrounding communities begin to park on our streets during their on-street parking bans. It could encourage those who use driveways most often to start parking overnight on the street more often, thereby limiting access for public safety vehicles as discussed in Part 1. It could also encourage people to buy an additional family car, and leave it on the street, which I will discuss more in Part 3.
But one of the most concerning consequences has less to do with parking than with housing affordability. A change to the ban without an adequate policy to replace it could have an impact on our rental economy and affordability in Watertown. One story we heard often at the parking ban public hearing was the story of individuals who are able to find more affordable housing in Watertown, but without an off-street parking space. Residents at the public hearing shared stories of their fortune of finding a rental in Watertown that was more affordable than any other in their neighborhood, but the rental came without a parking space. Residents asked at the hearing to remove the parking ban so that these more affordable units can have access to parking, often noting that this was an issue of equity. While this is often presented as an issue of equity for those with lower-cost apartments without parking, free on-street parking is not the answer that will solve this issue. By making Watertown easier for everyone to park, we inevitably make the housing without parking more appealing for renters with cars. Then we will see landlords begin to raise the price on these units because of the free resource we are now subsidizing for these renters – ultimately creating the question of whether that is an equitable solution to the problems raised at the Public Hearing. Essentially, by giving away our curb space for free, we incentivize the private market to raise prices for our most affordable units, on those who both own cars and those who don’t own cars. We need to consider this issue carefully as a part of any solution that might be put in place if there was not a parking ban.
Next week, in the third and final installment of this series, I will dive into some of the impacts of the winter parking ban on our long-term planning goals in Watertown.
George J. Proakis
City Manager | City of Watertown, Massachusetts