Nearly two years ago, two-thirds of the 700 people who took an online survey about parking in Northampton said they would be willing to pay more for spaces closer to their destinations downtown.
That’s a strong endorsement for the plan Mayor David J. Narkewicz put before the City Council last week, based on a consultant’s report in April 2015.
How much more? Not much at all, under the mayor’s plan. The cost of parking for an hour on Main Street between State and South on the west and Market on the east would rise just a quarter to $1.
So what’s holding it up?
Given how attached people are to their cars and habits, it can be risky for officials to change the rules on parking.
The mayor was right to speak, in an interview this week, of stress felt by people hunting for places to park. Plenty of it is attached to moving about Northampton in a motor vehicle these days. What car owner hasn’t had the experience of making a run along a section of Main Street hoping to find an open space, only to have to swing around through side streets?
The mayor’s rate change may be overly cautious. The April 2015 report by Walker Parking Consultants suggested starting with a 25-cent hourly increase on Main Street and then moving the 60-minute cost up by a quarter a year until it reached $1.50.
That fee is more likely to spur drivers to find parking off Main Street, which is relatively abundant.
By boosting the price to $1.50 now, city managers might not make friends, but they’d stand a much better chance of achieving their goal of freeing up spaces for drivers from outside the area who may not have as good a sense as locals of parking alternatives.
As it gets ready to roll out this disincentive to Main Street parking, the city already deploys a financial incentive: the first free hour of parking in the E.J. Gare Parking Garage. We know anecdotally that this freebie has trained a lot of people to go there first, skipping the trolling of Main Street and not contributing to traffic congestion. Oddly the Walker study suggested ending the first free hour of parking at the garage – which runs counter to the notion of luring parkers off Main Street. We don’t like that idea and said so in this space in May 2015.
Under the mayor’s proposal, once someone finds a spot on Main, they would get the convenience of staying for two hours instead of one. That’s also a little counter-intuitive, because it will slow the turnover of vehicles on the main drag.
Though we’re only talking about a 25-cent increase on Main, the stakes overall are hardly penny ante.
This week, a city committee that formed in August held its first forum on the interrelated issues of parking downtown, defining (and protecting) Northampton’s appeal and helping to orient first-time visitors. The panel is called the Northampton Wayfinding Ideate Committee, a snazzy name save for that third word, which means “to form an idea.”
The idea is to create signs that help people find their way around downtown. Not a bad idea, if the group can figure out how to get people to look at signs when they roll out of restaurants thinking, perhaps, “I can’t believe I ideate the whole thing.”
Clearly, people respond to what’s convenient. If they can’t park a few doors away from the store they wish to visit, it should be easier to pay for parking wherever shoppers end up. That’s the goal of another effort underway to modernize two dozen ticket pay stations to accept credit cards and mobile apps. Due to a delay outside the city’s control, those improvements won’t arrive until next year.
The mayor wants to roll out the Main Street fee increase in time to help open up spaces to holiday shoppers.
Government routinely uses fees to try to influence behavior. This one makes sense, but isn’t likely to move the needle.