In the third piece on the question of lifting the Winter Parking Ban permanently, Watertown City Manager George Proakis focused on how it would impact the City’s long-range planning.
By George Proakis
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.
In the past two weeks, I’ve provided information in editorials about the public safety and city operational impacts of the ban. Today, in my final letter, I want to share the impact from the perspective of long-range planning.
Our Climate and Energy Plan, which was endorsed by the City Council in 2022, establishes an ambitious goal of reduced vehicle travel. The plan seeks to increase the use of transit, bike and pedestrian travel through outreach, incentives, and policy changes. We are realistic that, today, most Watertown residents will need a car for much of their daily traffic needs. Therefore, we will need to continue to advocate for better transit to make it easier to live without a car. Yet, even as we advocate for more transit service, there are already more and more people willing to live without a car or with fewer cars and interested in selecting a walkable place like Watertown to do so. We want to encourage this whenever we can.
Meeting our climate goals will require a long-term transition. But we move that transition forward as we build more transit options. We set that transition back with every incentive that we create to live in Watertown with multiple vehicles.
Another long-range planning document we have is our Comprehensive Plan, adopted in September 2023 after a robust process of gathering public input to help define the future of our community. This plan included an entire chapter on transportation strategies. Within that chapter, the plan identified a specific goal to address parking policy. That goal reads:
“Evaluate our street parking policy, the winter parking ban, and parking during snow and ice events within the context of city-wide and neighborhood specific public safety requirements and their conflicting demands”.
The plan anticipated that this review be a carefully conducted study with a public participation process. The plan identified a timeline for this evaluation as “mid-term” (typically about 5-7 years into the plan’s timeline), so that our planning staff could prioritize more immediate projects, including the Watertown Square zoning process, and our upcoming mobility study, funded by federal ARPA funds– both projects focusing on upgraded transit as a part of their action steps.
I have spoken and written at length about the Watertown Square zoning process, and I recommend you read my forward in the Plan Document to get a sense of the positive impacts that plan can have on our downtown district. The ARPA study, to be completed with federal funding that Watertown has already received, will analyze our transit options here in Watertown including our existing shuttles. We are committed to making our shuttle system more effective, finding ways of improving our alternative transit options, improving our efforts to advocate with the MBTA, and making sure that we are providing alternatives that our Climate and Comprehensive Plans are aiming to accomplish.
Each of these high-level planning efforts take their own look, albeit aligned in their scope, around transit and parking, which are impossible to discuss separately in today’s environment. They are naturally coupled for several reasons. If you plan for cars, you get more cars. If you plan for walkable spaces, you get more people. Consider this: A recent study by University of California professor Adam Millard-Ball also found when buildings provide free or cheap parking, residents are more likely to buy a car and drive, but when buildings have transit access without easy free parking, residents who choose to live there find other ways to get around. Offering parking creates more cars and more trips. Offering better transit does the opposite.
To achieve the goals of our long-term planning priorities, we have focused on two strategies: 1) reducing zoning requirements for parking spaces; and 2) “unbundled parking.” Unbundling parking means that, when you rent an apartment, you pay extra if you want to rent a parking space. If you rent an apartment and you do not own a car, you do not need to pay for that parking space. This makes housing more affordable for those without a car and provides an incentive to rely on transit instead of driving. It sounds like a simple system, partially because it is. We know there is a direct correlation between one’s access to a vehicle and total miles traveled. This system, however, breaks when we make street parking entirely free 24/7, all year round. In Watertown, our short winter parking ban that is mainly in place for the public safety reasons I detailed in Part I, is actually what makes unbundled parking work right now. Without it, every new housing development with unbundled parking will allow for residents to bring cars, park on the street, and avoid the monthly fee for on-site parking, something that the premier voice on parking policy, Donald Shoup, refers to as “spillover.”
Spillover is defined in the late Professor Shoup’s 752-page book, The High Cost of Free Parking, considered to be the bible of parking regulation. While much of the book discusses strategies for parking in commercial districts, Professor Shoup advocates for unbundled residential parking and he cautions against policies that can cause spillover. He refers to spillover as a “nuisance for everyone”, and notes that some cities “prohibit overnight curb parking in order to prevent residents from using the streets as their garages.” His “more promising” solution to prohibited overnight parking is to “establish a parking benefits district that charge(s) market prices for curb parking and spend(s) the revenue to pay for public expenditures in the neighborhood.” To follow Professor Shoup’s advice would mean that, if we were to remove the parking ban, we’d need to create a monthly parking permit price for on-street parking that matches what the private market charges for similar parking – for many projects this is $50 to $150 a month. That would still need to be combined with an aggressive ticketing policy, a towing policy, and snow emergency policy – all of which makes for an incredibly complex system. It creates a funding source from permit fees that could support neighborhood infrastructure improvements. But, it also has equity impacts – and would likely require some sort of strategy to deal with low-income residents who still need a car. I don’t know if this is the answer to the winter parking ban, but any plan to change our curb parking policies needs to account for these impacts.
Finally, regardless of how we address winter parking, we need to keep in mind that our community has goals to be accessible for everyone. Our older population, our younger population, our population with disabilities, or those who do not own a car because they cannot afford one – it is key for us as a City to ensure we are putting our time and effort into building a better transportation system that works for everybody.
What’s Ahead?
Coming out of the Public Hearing, I want to reiterate my appreciation for the public’s involvement in this process. I also want to reiterate that my staff and I have heard the concerns raised by many residents with opinions on all sides of this issue.
Parking policies are complex, and they have direct, and indirect consequences on both our City’s goals, as well as our community member’s day-to-day lives. I don’t believe that we have yet found a single simple solution to address this complex problem. As I noted at the January 28th City Council meeting, I am working with staff to put together a schedule and budget that will make it possible to expedite the parking study proposed in the Comprehensive Plan. Until that is done, though, we need to keep the winter parking ban in place to meet our public safety needs and control potential unintended consequences of any change in policy. I hope to have more information about this study in the coming weeks and look forward to working with the City Council and the community to review options that address our community and our policy goals.
George J. Proakis
City Manager, City of Watertown, Massachusetts