I love this because it gets away from the ambiguity of parking good vs. parking bad and gets down to the heart of what people are afraid of — that their quality of life will be impacted because someone else’s problem (parking capacity) is being offloaded on them.

Install meters with resident sticker exceptions (plus maybe one guest pass per household) in adjacent neighborhoods, add them to the PALs enforcement area, do additional hires so someone can patrol daytime and evening, and there you go.

It may or may not be the perfect solution but it’s proof that, approached creatively, it doesn’t have to be one side wins, one side loses. We can do something that’s fair all around.

I agree that lots of free parking is a dis – incentive to alternative transportation methods. As the article above says – the way to get people out of their cars is to make parking scarce and expensive. To me that means not only the parking right next to the store or restaurant but also the parking spaces around the corner in the residential neighborhood. I don’t know how to do this – perhaps resident parking only zones or maybe meters in neighborhoods near commercial district with exemptions for residents ?

What neighborhoods have fought against are accommodations made to developers in the name of parking reform that really just serve to push the parking issue off the main streets and into the neighborhoods.

Last night I walked past Taqueria in the midst of the dinner hour. The TDS parking lot was full , Fairview building lot half full. I did a rough count. Half the cars had City of Decatur license plates on the front. Our parking issues are not just about out of towners driving to our restaurants.