Parking Meters
On Facebook the other day, I ranted about a variety of topics, ranging from turning those empty downtown high-rises into housing to parking meters, roundabouts, and the Second Street Bridge. It was fun. But now I feel an obligation to do more than just complain. I’ll start today with the parking meters and move on to the others later.
So, parking meters. In recent years, PARC has expanded the number of parking them on Bardstown Road. Business owners in the Douglass Loop area--and other Highlanders like me--view new meters there as an unnecessary economic barrier that could drive loyal neighborhood customers away to unmetered shopping destinations like Frankfort Avenue. In their eyes, a meter serves as an implicit tax on those who choose to support a Highlands business.
Merchants also fear that if customers have to pull out an app or find a digital kiosk just to park for 10 minutes, they will simply stop coming. The added friction turns a quick neighborhood errand into a chore.
Installing more meters on Bardstown Road will push drivers onto the free residential side streets, leading to the implementation of more aggressive Residential Parking Permits that further choke parking availability.
I wondered where all the meter money goes.
In the past, the $100,000 in annual revenue generated from these specific Loop meters has gone into Louisville Metro's general parking fund to subsidize larger downtown PARC garages. Does that sound fair?
How about this: Meter expansion money would likewise go directly into the city's general parking fund rather than being reinvested locally into the Highlands' streetscapes, lighting, or transit.
Metro Council District 8 rep Ben Reno-Weber has helped slow down PARC’s meter expansion plans in response to community pushback, but it sounds like he views it as inevitable. I hope that’s not true.
The sudden density of meters and the shift to digital apps feel like an explosion because PARC is trying to retroactively apply 21st-century urban- planning philosophy to historic neighborhoods designed before the automobile era.
Why is this happening?
Because some UCLA urban-planning professor’s book convinced city traffic departments like PARC to view parking meters as a scarce and highly valuable public asset for ECONOMIC GROWTH.
Their goal for metering is to price parking just high enough so that exactly 15% of the spaces on any given block remain vacant at any time, or about as long as it takes to drive around the block.
And they want to put 328 new ones along a 2.3-mile stretch of the Bardstown Road-Baxter Avenue corridor.
In Henry VI, Part 2, Shakespeare wrote, “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.” If he were living now, I believe he’d add urban planners to that list.