A Better Parking System might have kept Whitlock's Downtown

In the Sunday paper was a piece about a long-time downtown business moving out. It is an interesting case, but since the story genre was a little nostalgic and a kind of business feature, a column more than straight news story, it did not need to be particularly analytical. But peeking through is perhaps a way to thread the needle on our parking debate.

This week both the Downtown Advisory Board and the Citizen Budget Committee have parking on the mind, and the business and its move might be a good case study for the way we have thought about parking and better ways to think about it in the future.

Blaming parking

Vacuums and sewing machines are awkward and sometimes heavy. If it is reasonable to ask most customers to walk a block for a meal or cup of coffee or for light retail items, it is more difficult to make the same request of people lugging a heavy item to repair or one just purchased.

This is a business that has a reasonable need for a supply of car parking near their front door or by a service entry.

In the piece, our new dining platforms get the blame for intensifying a long-time problem. "On-street dining platforms have compounded the situation, wiping out 12 parking spaces within a two-block stretch...on Court Street." The tone of this framing is unfortunate, as downtown dining is a real public and private good, but it's not like it's really all that wrong either. This is a business that does need nearby curbside stalls, and the platforms have cut into the number of them.

The problem, however, is managing the nearby stalls, not any deficit in overall supply of parking. Parking audits have shown over and over that there is slack in the overall supply. This study is a little old, and I haven't seen one from the last year or two (understandable with the Pandemic).  While nearby curbside parking may have "long been an issue," applying that to the total supply is an overstatement.

Our parking garages have had plenty of room

The problem is uneven use of underpriced stalls: There is high demand for free on-street parking, but much less demand for equally free stalls in the garages. The City often has to promote the parking in them.

Free parking promo - November 2020

The piece doesn't make clear that parking in general, the total parking supply, is not a problem. The problem instead is our mania for free parking and the allocation distortion it introduces. Just adding more free parking downtown won't free up stalls at the front door of a particular business. 

There is a well-documented solution. The way to ensure open stalls near the front door of businesses is to price curbside parking dynamically for a constant 85% occupancy, ensuring 15% of stalls on every block face are open. That means there is always an available parking spot. Spots in the garages would remain free.

Moving to a priced system for curbside parking and keeping a free system for the garages will better balance supply and demand. Eliminating the City's parking tax would mean businesses could rebudget that line item to support their own customers specifically. They could still validate or rebate parking if they wanted. 

Without moving to a new building outside of downtown, under a better parking system there would be more ways to solve a problem with nearby parking.

The Downtown Advisory Board has repeatedly asked for a right-priced system. They have identified other reasons for it also. It could have helped a business like Whitlock's, and will help others who are still downtown.  This memo is again in the DAB packet for Thursday, and is in the Budget Committee packet for Wednesday.

Request to move to right-priced parking

There are of course other elements to the story. Parking gets sensationalized and even scapegoated as the reason, but surely there are other factors, including national changes in retailing. Copious free parking did not ensure JC Penney or Nordstrom stayed open and remained downtown. Whitlock's might have wanted to move anyway, even without any problem with parking. It is easy to understand wanting to be near a quilt store or wanting to downsize to adjust rent costs and inventory, and to respond to ecommerce. "Parking" could be just shorthand, a convenient way to simplify a more complicated situation.

By moving to a modern parking system downtown will have more curbside stalls available for people who need them, a better balance with usage in the garages since free parking will still be available there, and everyone will have a better sense of the total demand so that if there is actual demand for new parking both the City and private developers will have good data for expensive construction and will not overbuild.

More on downtown parking:

• "DAB Again to Recommend Parking Reform" (2022)
• "City Council, June 12th - Funding Downtown Parking District" (2021)
• "City Council, April 8th - Downtown Parking" (2019)
• "Article on Downtown Restaurant Mixes Parking and DUI Strangely" (2017)
• "2016 Downtown Parking Assessment Discussed on Thursday" (2017)

Historical notes relevant to the move:

• Half of the downtown store is in a building designed by the architect of the Carnegie Library: "100 Years Ago: Twenty mph is Plenty; Whitlocks by George Post; Hops better than Paving." (2016)
• Some grocery history on the new location for Whitlock's: "At Oxford Park site Ericksons Supermarket building now home to Fitts Seafood and Santiam Wine." (2021)

And standard texts on parking:

• The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup (rev. 2011)
  
• Parking and the City Edited by Donald Shoup (2018)
• From the Oregon Transportation and Growth Management program, "Parking Made Easy" (2013)