City Manager Shares Thoughts on Winter Parking Ban Related to Public Safety

Following the discussion about potentially removing Watertown’s Winter Parking Ban at a City Council meeting, Watertown City Manager George Proakis wrote the first in a series of responses to the issue. See the first piece provided by the City of Watertown, below.

Part 1: Public Safety

By City Manager 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.

I want to thank our residents for the chance to have a community dialogue about the Winter Parking Ban. Our role as a City Government is guided, in so many ways, by our residents, their concerns, their vision, their interests. As with all public hearings, this one allowed residents with a variety of opinions on the parking ban to share their opinions with the Council and with City staff.

After hearing from so many residents, I shared thoughts on the current status of the ban and the challenges we face with any changes we may make. As our City’s winter parking ban continues to be a topic of conversation, I would also like to share my thoughts in writing for those who may not have heard my comments that night or those who left the meeting early. A decision to make any change with parking policy is not mine to make – such policies are under the control of the city council and/or the traffic commission. But, this is my perspective, both as the City Manager who supervises the staff that works daily to educate the public and enforce this ban, as well as my perspective as a long-time city planner who has dealt with the challenge of parking issues for over two decades.

Our winter parking ban requires cars to be off the street each night. Most residents meet the requirements of the ban by relying on their own driveway, garage or apartment building parking lot. For some, with limited or tandem driveway spaces, this has challenges, as cars parked conveniently on street during the day or during summer months must be squeezed back into a driveway on a winter night. But many who shared their experience at the public hearing don’t have their own driveway to park at night. Some without driveway space will rent a parking space in a neighboring driveway or private lot. Others rely on the 900 public parking spaces that we offer around the city 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.

Nonetheless, there are complex challenges to address before determining if we should make changes to the ban. I want to share some thoughts and have broken them down into three categories:

1. Public safety
2. City Operations
3. Long-Range Planning

As each of these issues have their own complex concerns, I’m sharing each in a separate article. To begin, today I will take on public safety concerns. 

The ordinance that regulates overnight parking, like many of our ordinances, has no purpose statement. So it is difficult to immediately assume the purpose of any particular regulation. In fact, this ordinance is written as a year-round ban on overnight parking and that is how it appears in our traffic regulations. However, since the ordinance was originally passed, and as time evolved, our City made the decision to enforce this ban only in winter months. Though the initial purpose is not clear in the ordinance, from what I’ve learned in the community, the ban’s origins are tied very closely to public safety. In particular, it was designed to ensure that our public safety and public works vehicles can get around the city, and it becomes especially important when there is snow on the streets. Certainly, it is a top priority of any city administration to ensure that an ambulance or a fire truck can safely reach its destination when a resident calls 911.

Over the previous few years, we have experienced very light snowfall. There is a sentiment that arose at the Public Hearing suggesting climate change may contribute to that trend continuing in the years to come. But, as many climate scientists have suggested, there is also the possibility that climate change contributes to a wider range in weather extremes. The drier winters that we have experienced the past few years could be one weather extreme, while there is also the distinct possibility of snowier winters being another weather extreme. And those of us who were living in Massachusetts in 2015 will remember that winter started out dry and slow in December and early January, and then suddenly we were getting one storm after another in close succession. Snow emergencies in communities were put in place for weeks as it became impossible to push snow further off the roads that winter.

It would not be wise to make the assumption that winters such as 2015 are behind us. And, it’s not just snow that is an issue in winter. With icy conditions, our Public Works team are tasked with keeping our road salted throughout the winter, however as our roads become busier, parked cars can impact the spread of salt, leaving portions of our streets untreated. And rather than turning to a system where we must call snow emergencies for an ice and salt situation, we rely on the winter parking ban to appropriately address the public safety concern and keep our roads safe for our residents and those who travel through Watertown day-to-day.

We are currently enforcing the ban from Thanksgiving to March. We have tried to be as flexible as possible – lifting the ban if we can when people visit around the holidays and often lifting the ban early if there is likely to be no more snow at the end of the season. We do ticket cars that violate the ban, with a $15 fine. We also have the right to tow cars when they are in the way of public safety operations or snow removal operations. We offer the lots that we can offer for off-street overnight parking, but we do need them clear in the morning for city and school operations. We do as much as we need to maintain safe streets and we try to provide options for residents who have limited places to park.

At the public hearing, our public safety department leaders, while open-minded to consider alternatives, cautioned strongly against removing the ban. There has been a suggestion that the city can replace this ban with occasional snow emergency parking bans – thereby reducing the number of nights that residents without a driveway would have to move cars to off-site lots. We do call snow emergencies now, when we need to clear the streets of cars for snow removal outside of the overnight hours. We spread the word through our “Everbridge” reverse-911 call system, through our website and social media. We are looking to add additional informational warning systems, including using the DPW electronic signs on our main roadways. Nonetheless, we have work to do before we can rely only on a snow emergency system to meet the public safety needs related to snow removal and emergency response in the winter. Simply put, many people already ignore our snow emergency parking bans when we call them outside of the regular winter parking ban hours. We are still trying to determine why this happens. Some may not be getting the messages. Others may not be home to move their car between the time we call and the start time of this ban. Maybe others just don’t take the snow emergency seriously. Without the winter ban, these residents might not move their car when we need access to streets for snow operations. But, the winter ban creates a routine of removing cars from the street daily. Replacing this with an occasional snow emergency parking ban system would require more work before it would be universally respected and implemented.

By combining our current winter parking ban with our snow emergency declarations, our community is better prepared for the necessary steps to remove one’s car from the streets when needed. If we were to remove the winter parking ban from our policies, our emergency notification system must have a reach beyond what is currently possible, and residents must take that call seriously and move cars. So, in the short term, the ban must remain. Making abrupt changes to our current system, I fear, will impact our City operations as currently constructed, and also cause greater concern for clearing our streets in emergencies when we need them cleared the most.

In the long-term, regardless of whether we maintain the process of keeping the winter parking ban, or moving to a new system, public safety has to be included first and foremost in that conversation. But, there is more to the ban than just its public safety elements.

In the second installment of these editorials, I’ll share more about the operational challenges and unintended consequences of allowing year-round free overnight on-street parking for all vehicles.