 Thank you for coming. I'm Christine Graham Mullen. I'm the chair of the downtown parking working group. We I just want to first off say we have some other members of the group. We have Catherine Porter. She's and we have Sharon Povinelli and then we have Connie Kruger who was a member but she's not but she's still very active in helping us go through this. It's been ongoing since 2016 and we were working with Nelson Nygaard that time. Then there was a break and last fall we went to bid to look for a consultant to continue with the work and Nelson Nygaard was rehired. They're new players but the same company and they came up to speed and so this part started late winter. They did some more parking counts which was the big part of the last hunk of the work and since then they've been analyzing and looking at best practices and they are coming to us tonight is the second forum to give us their expert advice on strategies and best practices and where they think we should go from here to improve our parking and suggest how to get an implementation plan because that's the important part. We want this to actually happen and parking to improve so they have a lot to cover. They have a lot of information to give us but we do want to have public participation and your questions answered so how we have structured it is they will do an introduction and then it breaks into eight goals that have been established to generally improve parking and under that there's strategies and suggestions for each section so at the end of each goal before they start the next one they'll take five minutes of questions. I'm suggesting please try to keep it to questions more than like parking horror stories because we all have them and also if the questions can be sort of pointed to the goal that we're currently discussing and if you have other questions that either don't get answered or don't relate to the goals save them till the end there'll be some more Q&A then and they're willing to stay and answer people's questions and they also have a couple of other ways and activities that you'll be able to give your your your questions and input to so the five minutes I'm just going to have a card so when it gets close to five minutes I'm going to put it up so that's telling them to keep them on schedule and you'll all kind of understand if you don't get selected so our two consultants we have Matt Smith and Jason Navson and without further ado we'll give them our attention thank you great hi everybody good to see everyone again my name is Matt Smith and this is my colleague Jason and we're going to be going through a very detailed presentation so unlike others where you kind of talk about concepts and just you know what we're going to be doing what we just learned this is going to be very detail specific so bear with us that's why we've broken it into these various topics and they're really taking questions as we go the idea is to really run through the specificity of what needs to be done in order to do a parking management strategy so here we go so go yes and I'm just so that the idea is to probably to fill that out at the end if you're doing your your priorities because I think the more you learn that might change some of your opinion so that would be the goal and then this board up here for those who maybe if you're ranking 10 I think it might be easier just to pick your top three that's why we've provided that as well so they're they're very I would say complementary so just to kind of start talking so right now you know we're going to be talking about the project process doing a quick update kind of an overview of what we kind of learned talk about the direct recommendations and then the next steps it's really important to understand where we're at so we've done all the data gathering input both in 2016 and then recently this year to update it we've identified a lot of the key issues that we discussed at the first meeting then we developed some draft recommendations that we've been working through with the town and now what we are we've created more of an implementation strategy and that's what we really want to hear your feedback on and have the questions so the difference in just so you're kind of understanding for those who were not the previous meeting is that in 2016 it was it was really more of a data collection exercise it focused it was very little public engagement and so it really was just like this is where you're at there was not an implementation strategy and therefore I think that's maybe was a little bit confusing here what we've been doing is really focusing on the implementation we did do new counts so we did repeat that to kind of confirm and it was actually quite similar which is good to know so that it was accurate and then now what we really want to do is focus on strategies in a step-by-step way that will help you to manage the parking the reason we're doing this is that first of all there should nothing should be like ruled out you could need new parking you could need less I mean you need more you might need less you don't know you want to make sure everything's on the table so you want to do because of the cost implications just make sure that you're doing everything you can first to actually solve your problems before really I would say large municipal capital investments so the existing parking inventory let's just start so as just a quick overview of you have just under 3,300 total spaces over 60 percent of those though are owned by private entities which means they're not necessarily available to the general public they may be available to customers or people visiting or employees but they're not for anyone to use any time of the 40 percent you've got you know got permit parking which is the town center permit you've got public meter about just under 700 and then you've also got some unregulated where anyone can park some of those permits also is we'll get into detail also become unregulated after certain times so there's actually more parking than some people realize just so you can see oh it's this button oh what just happened huh there we go I was trying to do the oh there we go so something so all the purple is the private so you can see there's a lot of it and then the green is the is the public so you can see how much more private there is just so everyone gets a really good understanding and that's a maybe an opportunity that we're going to discuss again what we kind of learned is that so again 30 percent of them are open during regular hours 40 percent just available to the public after 5 p.m those are those permits and then the rest that's 60 percent isn't necessarily there's definitely different things there's do you have meter two hour meter four hour and one of the things we're going to be talking about is let's make that a little bit simpler and provide more flexibility one thing we are going to keep saying is flexibility is really key that's something that we want to emphasize as you're really trying to figure this out and implementing different measures so how things have changed really what the main things is that the regulations were all over the place back in 2016 and it has been simplified essentially if you can look there's you have a more time limit consolidation there you can it's pretty predictable between which streets you are where the unregulated is makes it easier and then what they did is that the lower demand areas in the periphery are price lower than at the in the core area and things like that so that's a pretty best practice but that's about the extent of which I think that that's the big the recommendations we normally would make would happen and that's we we focused on terms of your parking utilization we want to kind of understand and this is one of the first thing was how busy is your parking and that's the first key thing because we can't make strategies without understanding it so we we looked at the different counts and so what we found it was interesting is your peak is actually in saturday at 7 p.m from the different ones that we looked at thursday and saturday many places that's not the case would be during the day this is reflecting something and this is a change in how downtowns are operating they become much more destinations for dining and things so the peak that we always used to plan for used to be when you had a much more varied retail base but now it's becoming more the evening and this is the opportunity to start thinking about what are the hours that you're charging why are you charging those days were charged and they stopped at different hours because that's when it was busy this is changing in downtown's not here but throughout the country so it's that thing to think about so but the interesting thing is that it is still well utilized both weekdays and weekends this is the key one right here this is on saturday at 7 p.m when you've hit 86 percent of your public utilization anything over 85 percent is when you start to feel it's full from just like an everyday perspective it means there's just not a lot of spaces available there are some but they're not as easy to find so it's about perception in terms of the town center permits these are the permit spaces that are that that end at 5 p.m and these are in the side streets primarily as you can see during the weekday there's really strong utilization you're at about 80 percent that's great but it does really peter off as you hit the 5 p.m hour when certain people are leaving their work probably we find that interesting because you have an active and you have many restaurants and dining so that those require quite a few employees so it's a little confusing why that does actually decrease in our understanding and what we've heard is probably people are parking on the street often in front of the stores that's something we're trying to avoid and then your weekend town center permit there's actually quite a bit of availability so there is that parking interestingly enough though the people don't realize that after 5 p.m you can park in those things in those spaces it's free you have a lot of available parking so that's something to consider and then the private spaces this is the this is my favorite chart in many ways and this is where there's opportunity but also constraints and we'll talk about that your part private parking is underutilized at all times of during the day whether it's weekday and weekend there are literally almost there's nearly 900 spaces available at any given time within the study area how you can hopefully try to maximize or use that would be really beneficial and then now we want to kind of talk about what you kind of have now so this is one of the things that we found was really interesting there's really that your system structure here is kind of all over the place you want to simplify it here I mean like if you just look at this chart it's kind of you've got meter on street lot then you've got town issue permits there's actually a bunch of different kind of permits that even confuse us so simplifying that then there's free parking unregulated 15 minute things like that and then don't even then you have the parking residential commercial private permit we just have to figure that out and make it simpler this is common this has happened because basically there's been changes made over the years and rather than really kind of I would say consolidating it it this becomes a little unruly very very very common and then one of the bigger issues is that there's really no consolidated parking entity to or person in the town to actually kind of I would say run the show and that so that becomes a problem when you do have an active environment so right now you've got your economic development coordinating it but then then you know the police are doing enforcement there's the treasure collector is involved all these people are involved so not necessarily the best way because no one knows who to go to there's not one central point of contact so when there's complaints maybe people aren't hearing them or they're just maybe not getting to the right person so having maybe rethinking this and how it's done is one of the things we really want to talk about as part of this and then your rate structure and your payment technologies there's you know there's different payment types you've got your old traditional meters which are coin only you've got your payment kiosks that's one thing you've got park mobile which we are huge advocates for and we we saw through this process it's being used quite a bit which is great also gives you a lot of flexibility for strategies we're going to talk about there are the kiosks are definitely the off street but then the on street or the coin ops so that kind of limits some of the strategies so that's going to be dealt with and you just want to make sure that you're thinking holistically when you get into the strategies to make sure that whatever you're doing you're starting to bring consistency to the entire downtown parking structure so all those things are what we learned and what we've now done is we're going to we've grouped all these recommendations into these overarching parking goals and then the after each goal as was just explained there's going to be some specific strategies not going to go through them because we're going to talk about them all but there's basically eight and we're going to really go over I got the individual pieces one by one so this is how we developed it your key issue your parking management structure structure this is we're going to start talking about how the actual parking system is operated from a staff perspective it's decentralized you've got a coordinator but all these different entities actually who are responsible for different pieces so our goal would be then to create an efficient responsive parking management structure that serves all the downtown stakeholders seems pretty simple okay what does that mean one of our priority recommendations would be to create a dedicated transportation in parking leadership position within the town this is a person who would be essentially be responsible for all the policy implementation of transportation and parking it has to be coordinated what that really does is it gives you that dedicated person who can actually then be that point person but also the one who's tracking the implementation and also becomes that point of context so that they know who needs to do what in order to make things happen that's very hard to do when it's decentralized right now you don't really know who's doing what what it is even with the best of your ability it's without having that central person who can commit full-time it's really difficult so that's something we think would be very advantageous um here's the other piece it's also then one this happens is to create that communication um kind of implementation communication program it's one thing to change things but if people don't understand what's been changed or when it was changed or what's even proposed it's not really going to be super beneficial because it's very hard I think people change is difficult and people will resist it unless there's as much information to get people to kind of understand what those changes are and why they were made it can be very difficult to do so I mean this gets everything from just explaining why we think you know right now you have the downtown parking working group it'd be great if something comes out of that to be an extended I would say committee or something a lot of towns have traffic and parking commissions or just downtown parking groups that really are in charge with the policy it gives a it gives a little bit more I would say I have a checks and balances to make sure that all the issues are being heard and then there's also a decision making process about what's being prioritized rather than it being just kind of like what's the most I would say what's the loudest issue of the time um the other piece is that when changes occur have a very specific strategy from my time when I was a parking um director you had to communicate it that starts everything with a press release that goes out just notifying so that it's covered in the local paper that can be posted online um it's having ensuring that there is a point of contact which would hopefully be that person who is now the the basically the transportation and parking staff member um but it's also the follow-up who is going to be doing the follow-up communication who is going to be answering those questions what are those maybe I would say what are maybe some of the impediments that you know get in the way of implementing something in a timely fashion it could be funding it could be a construction delay things like that um and then really communicate those large policy um decisions so it's it's important you need to get public workshops you can have just trainings it's all important that that is all happening um that's how you actually get the information out and then here's another one we think is really critical and um fortunately is allowed now is that we would really suggest establishing a parking benefit district parking benefit districts what they are they are a district you define the boundaries in the downtown it's easy and what happens is that the revenues that are generated from the parking go back into the parking system so essentially goes into a special fund um there's different types of funds it can be a special fund within a general fund it can actually be an enterprise fund that that's for a later decision but essentially it means is that that money specifically goes into the investment reinvestment of the system it can buy new equipment it can do infrastructure it can do signage um there are certain parameters but essentially it allows you to maintain it and it dedicates that funding for when you if you do need to add actually additional supply it can be used for debt service it can be used for even like for street lighting anything that that is attributed to the parking system that can be used so that's one thing we really think is important um and actually by establishing something like that it allows you to really have a much clearer path to actually implementing many of the strategies we're going to be talking about um funding becomes a little bit less of an issue and it's not like a fight every year um i've been through it so i understand it's why it's a really valuable cool um just as an example when this is really in the final report we like to do um best i mean you know case studies best practices um in pasadena and california many years ago they actually implemented one it's probably one of the most successful parking benefit districts in the country um and we we still use this 2011 number because we don't even need to update anymore it's been so successful they raised well they was well in excess of a million dollars a year that go into the improvements of that district and what that means that is used for the consistency of signage to do the equipment and so they even have this is one of the great things is they put this little sign on every meter and this is what it's about the the money you're saying is going to improving the safety of the streets and the environment it's actually kind of because you have a bid it's a great partner because you have a bid that's actually really working business improvement district um with the businesses to really i would say live in the downtown but now if you have it a revenue stream to actually make sure that the public realm is actually up to date and the parking is good now you've got a really good combo and with that i'm going to take questions about um anything about the idea of you know really consolidating to having a i would say one parking manager or other strategies oh i am totally in support of that idea because over the years i've been here 13 years as a resident i found that i don't know who to go to and even in snow emergencies you know we're told to go to our dpw but our dpw is closed so how can we go to our dpw and yet if you go to the police the police say i'm sorry we need we take orders from the dpw so it's extremely confusing for residents in amherst to know who do i go to and so that idea is i agree it's it would be at the top of my list hi kitty axelson berry from district two i have a question when you talk about private parking spaces are you talking about homes or what are these private parking spaces good question so when we talk about that that's when you okay this is the best way i can always describe it when you have a private business that has its own parking so say you have a doctor's office this is an example that has maybe 20 spaces downtown typically they may only be needing those during the day during office hours but now there's 20 parking spaces available at night and what you can do is enter into a informal or an informal agreement that those spaces can be used by the public or even by a private entity we're going to talk a little bit more about that we are not talking at all about people's private driveways and things like that these are these are commercial uses typically sometimes it can also be a larger i would say if there's like a larger housing complex that has a lot of excess parking that can be used as well particularly during the day so it's kind of what you're doing is you're looking for uses that have different hours so for instance a business where their employees are there during the day at night it opens up those can be great shared opportunities for a different use at night and there can actually be actually we'll talk about it but revenue implications for for the better for the actual owners so hi i'm joe golly i'm on the disability access committee or numerous and one of the goals we've been trying to do as a as a committee is to identify the hp spots and and this is related to the private parking that you're talking about because let's take for example the the bank downtown by the emmer cinema there's hp parking there so if someone parks in that spot illegally technically it can't the police can't enforce the state law or for that matter if they're part if someone's parked illegally in any of the stores in the park lots cbs or whatever uh because the idea is that because it's private property the police don't have a right to ticket someone that's violating the law if my understanding is correct you want to work out a you want to work out some kind of collaboration with private businesses to open up their parking lots to um to other people yeah so what you would be doing and that's we're going to get much more into that so i'll i'll answer this probably a little bit quicker than i will because we'll get more um what we do is you actually have formal agreements these are contractual agreements that create like a public use of that space um with that comes like the idea of who has the liability for any maybe injury that may occur on that but also you can at that point when it's a share because now it is a public use then you can even you even can include the enforceability of that space because it's now a least space for the public use so therefore it is in that that in that realm if it's an informal agreement no that's not something the police can do or if it's like a private agreement between two businesses no the police can't force that as well um but if it is under a public lease then yes they can okay that'd be great because we try doing it as a committee and we couldn't get any cooperation yeah that's um i think we'll talk a little bit more about ways you can do that to actually get more cooperation and a lot of time it's a financial incentive which actually is revenue so we'll talk so we'll go on to the next goal too so um basically what we know is public parking is overutilized we would have hit that kind of threshold that 85 percent you've hit 86 percent at 7 p.m on saturdays and we know that that can happen on fridays as well so um what happens at that point so really now what you want to do is you want to make sure that the strategies you're actually implementing are really trying to get at that utilization to try to encourage both turnover but more efficient use of parking throughout the system so this is the public parking that we're talking about and this is when we're really talking about the on and off street metered and kiosk spaces we're not including right now the town center permit um so you want to create a downtown parking system that provides the convenient predictable and flexible parking and flexible we're going to say that again for downtown residents workers and visitors so everybody you want to make sure a system is working for all users so what do we mean by that so there's there's different steps you want to do and one of the things you want to do is you want to we say you want to first set the goals what is your availability and turnover goal that means how often do you want cars to be leaving how often do you are you expecting them to be opening up new spaces things like that so you want to understand this utilization and we have recommendations to track the utilization on a regular basis to make sure that your current policies are up to snuff and that they're actually addressing what they need to but one of the things that we've noticed you already have two four and eight hour spaces and longer unregulated you want to understand okay what is it you know most people and you start doing this through turnover counts that their average turnover is two to three hours then that should be your baseline that's what you're trying to really do in most places particularly those on street spaces you if it winds up being four or five and the non-core you'll have different regulations you have to understand what's actually happening within the patterns um that's the first piece and then what you want to do is is it 85 percent everywhere if you want it to be really easy in some areas you might want to say 75 percent is your is your turnover if you want it to be packed you could go to 95 percent it's up to you but we still see 85 percent is that typical baseline for those core areas it basically means there's like one space probably like every like seven or so spaces is available so that you'll find something so that's the first thing you do after that you want to make sure that you establish basically and then continue to do those routine counts essentially you're doing that because if you're if you're doing it once every two or three years you don't know how a new development or change in businesses has affected your parking and when you have more staff this is more possible um so you want to empower the decision makers to make that that have that critical information and be able to make those decisions and then work with like you know a newer version of like the downtown parking working group have policy changes um you want to make sure that you're using the data and this is great you already have your parking on kiosk and park mobile you have an amazing amount of data already that you can assess this and then even use like your overall revenue that's being generated from the coin operated to understand exactly where you're at essentially your revenue should reflect the percentage of time being used um and then you want to but you but you do still want a supplement you want to know what's going on that's why we suggest doing actual counts unless you're actually in the environment I think you all know we consider and talk about data but you know what your personal experience is there could be very good reasons why people why it might show that there's fewer people parking okay for instance snow if if several spaces in the core weren't cleared very well no one's parking there so that would actually show our lower utilization so that's why you have to understand that so that's why counting utilization and understanding it over time is really important because what that's gonna do now we would suggest right now you the idea of a graduated pricing scheme I'm gonna let Jason talk about this because he's really good at it because I always confuse people so here's Jason all right thank thank you mad and um you know thank you everyone there's a lot to go through tonight I do want to spend you know a pretty good amount of time on this strategy because I think this is very much core to what we're trying to accomplish for you and again we'll have a question period just after this so you know please hold your your questions but we do want to keep this conversational so you know as you're aware there are time limits in place on most metered spaces I believe actually all metered spaces in Amherst most towns do it that way you park in a space it says you have two hours here then you have to get out obviously depending on what you're doing that can be a serious issue you know let's say you show up you want to come see a movie you know it's going to take longer than two hours and you're driving around and you're looking for a space you finally find okay and you get in there and you see oh wait two hours max what do I do now now I either take the chance of parking here I might get a ticket or I'm gonna have to keep driving around I'm gonna be late for what I can report something like that that's a problem especially in such a highly utilized system like you you do have here so what we're proposing here is what we call a graduated pricing scheme so what that means is you know up to say two hours in your core area that's your current time limit you just pay that normal one dollar per hour rate same thing you're paying now we'd also offer first 15 minutes free for individuals were to say running in to grab a coffee somewhere they don't need to stay longer than a few minutes that way they're not having to pay you know some larger amount to just run in and out the real difference here is what happens after two hours so right now in your core on-street meters you're not allowed to park more than two hours what we're proposing is that there's no time limits at all you can park as long as you want but when you start to park longer than two hours you start to pay a slightly higher rate so that's going to encourage people who don't need to stay too long hopefully to you know move along after two hours but for someone who needs to stay for three four hours they have that option they know they're not stuck they're not going to get a ticket they do have to pay that extra dollar or whatever it may be again these are not finalized rates that we're proposing this is just an example but the idea is that you continue to you know raise that rate for those later hours so that gives flexibility to the user and it means you're capturing that extra revenue and you're still hopefully encouraging you know meeting those turnover goals that Matt already mentioned because you do want people to continue to move along throughout the day so again the the systems that you already have parkion and your park mobile app they can facilitate this so you already have the technology in place to do this again it's not always a concept that people are familiar with because you know we're used to having time limits but we really believe that this model is something that could be very effective here and you know both on the user side and on the town side so I believe that is the last strategy for this goal there's actually a quick case study here that I'll walk us through specific to this pricing so the city of Santa Cruz California converted to a system just like this you can see here you know they do have there we go so these are some of the examples of the rates that they have these are different zones in town so let's take this the second row here you can see for the first hour and second hour people are paying a dollar fifty then it's doubling up to three dollars and then over four hours they're charging you know a pretty hefty six dollars per hour we're not recommending specific rates or that you would follow rates like that that's just an example but you can really see what they're trying to accomplish there so what do they find well 55 percent of their users were staying for one to two hours which is what you would want what you would expect they did have that 23 percent of people you know staying up to four hours and then a very few people staying you know eight hours or more so they also found that there are fewer citations citations not really fun for everyone it's not business friendly it doesn't feel good for the for the user in a model like this it's much less likely for people to get parking tickets because they know okay I'll just pay that that couple extra bucks and and you know get on with what I came here to do plus their overall revenue increased especially within a parking benefit district that means that you're capturing more revenue for those downtown improvements you know that really benefit everybody so you know here's a you know I put this quote in here because I think this is from the parking manager in Santa Cruz you know just really highlighting some of the the key things that they were so pleased about saying you know we used to get so many upset parkers because they were getting citations they're trying to keep the meters you know then they got rid of the time limits all of a sudden they reduced the number of citations by 30 percent more people are using park mobile and they're still getting people in and out typically in you know one to two hours which is good because it means spaces are open enough so really a great success story and something we wanted to share with you uh so with that before we get into goal three you know we'll take questions on anything related to goal two hi alisa cambell um I may not be typical I come to town to go to the movie or to come to a meeting the meeting I don't know how long it's going to last the movie I have some idea I also don't have a smartphone so I use coins do the does this allow for that and what what about having some places for people who want to park downtown for a fairly long period of time but are willing to park on the edge presumably there would be different areas absolutely I'm I'm I'm happy to answer that so your existing on-street meters they're coin operated I don't believe that that technology would allow for this however your off-street lots with those kiosks those are ready to use that you don't need a smartphone and I believe they'll accept you know credit cards or coins or what have you so so that's certainly in place um you know another part of this and we'll get into it a little bit later is the possibility to move to kiosks uh you know everywhere including on-street that's that's another strategy that we'll discuss um and you know to answer your other question um you know there's you know right now in your current system you have these two different zones you have sort of the core zone which is a little bit more expensive and then you have the 50 cents per hour spaces that are a little bit further away you could certainly keep that that model in place with us you could have half rates you know in the in the outlying zone for if someone knows they want to park for eight hours they'll go a little bit further away they'll pay you know half as much as as what they would have in the in the middle of town so you can absolutely accommodate yeah I think that's what the main thing I would just actually say is that what's great about when you have the technology like the kiosks and things you can very easily have different rates for different areas um and rather than you may not even have areas that where there is graduated pricing that could be once for instance the the edge areas could stay a lower rate all day long whereas in those really core areas where you want the turnover then that's where you can have the more graduated there's a lot of flexibility that's why you have to understand the utilization counts and the patterns of which people are parking and that will help you set that strategy Rebecca hull uh does this imply that you're going to be adding more meters to areas that currently don't have meters like near the police station and uh back in that area behind damers college where the streets are um I guess they're permit parking up until five o'clock and then after that they're free um we didn't we do not specifically recommend adding meters to other areas I don't think that should ever be off the table if you're if you continue to have higher and higher utilization um that can always be an option but that's not called for right now um I think the other actually actually meeting that question that was that was just presented there are unregulated spaces that um within the area yeah I mean so oh no no no we're not we're not proposing that at all um the idea is to have those different pricing strategies because that's a balance system that gives people choice and therefore what you're essentially doing is there's the premium parking where you have businesses and you need that turnover but if someone is spending all day you want to make sure that's there but no we're not specifically saying to add more meters okay so here we go oh one more I'm going to go back one hi um Kathy Shane um if you had a kiosk that was programmable and uh the example if you've come downtown for a meeting and it's a public meeting are there any ways of programming it that the rate is lower if you're serving for community meetings so some of the preferred areas could be um it's a discounted rate it's at the kiosk so is it flexible enough to do that if you had a code that you were given a code for your meetings um we would have to look at the specific kiosk some of them definitely can do that um that would just be one of the considerations you can do that with your park mobile app and that's something we're going to talk about um in terms of a validation program but there there are always ways around that um sometimes it's as simple as you can have um essentially like um a placard that can be used if you if it if you want to make sure everybody has access that's important you want to make sure that it's all equitable but most of the kiosks you can do that um it just depends on the your ability to program on the fly and working with a vendor but usually the codes are the best way to go okay so here we're gonna go this is our third and so while Amherst Park public parking is highly utilized private parking other facilities are underutilized this is the big issue and this is where we're getting it shared parking so really this is what we're talking about maximizing those existing and underused public or private parking which is as we saw about half of it's available at all time at least almost 900 spaces or more um before you make those high cost capital improvements and that's the idea of like if you have to build a new parking facility a garage things like that you want to make sure that because those are very expensive so you want to look at lower cost issues so here we're gonna this is going to be a very step by step because I think this is what happens I think people think oh and I think often it's like oh do shared parking oh that's the that's the solution it's actually a process and you actually have to be very I would say um deliberate about it in order for it to work so here we go so the first thing you want to do is you want to identify the opportunities for shared parking not every lot that is owned by a private entity is going to be suitable for it it has to be visible you want to make sure there's enough so first thing you want to do is you want to stack track the status of the private parking facilities so you want to actually inventory it understand where they are and who owns them so that you have like a database then you want to coordinate with a lot owners you want to like reach out to them understand okay are they even interested then you want to actually understand like okay once you know they are what are you kind of telling them you want to make sure that are they interested in doing a town shared where like the public can use it or would they be more interested maybe entering a share a private agreement and there are differences a public one is where basically the town would manage it or they would they would agree that the public could use it through another entity which is like Park mobile for instance a private one is when like two businesses collaborate so for instance say there's a restaurant owner and they need parking for their employees they have an agreement with the owner of the other link for that parking to be used solely by their employees and they get like probably like a little piece of paper that says they're allowed to park there so that's that's that's the formal but informal not everyone's able to do it so this can be really difficult so this is what we're saying if you have a lot a private lot with about five parking spaces that's probably not a good option for a public shared agreement it's confusing it's like how much signage are you going to use is it really going to add so we kind of delineate that you should identify your public opportunities like we'd be like 20 or more spaces and then those private shared agreements that you would go for that you would try to get people to coordinate their own under 20 you want to make sure there's going to be bang for your buck essentially and your time also how many signs do you want you also want to avoid too much signage clutter and things like that so make sure that you can actually make I would say a good decision about where you're actually trying to do this okay so then now you have a bunch of interested parties this is what we think you have to be ready to jump a lot of times they say there's like a lease changing or a property just changes hand that's when you want to get in there a lot of times to talk to the new owner or the new business owner um have language sample language whether it's for the public shared agreement so that you know you're going to use it or for like I would say a private entity so that you can give it to them and facilitate that discussion and see if people are still interested if without that then you could just lose a lot of time and then therefore the opportunities lost um so you want to consider okay where this is where we're saying the larger facility you don't want to use something where there's going to be the likelihood of someone tripping is it in good shape those are who has the liability um what are the current relationships what are the the financing or like the development is going to be needed all of these pieces are important so if a new building comes coming in for instance and they're going to provide parking it'd be great to incentivize it like you maybe have a parking reduction if it's shared that has to be formalized you want to make sure you have this at the ready when this occurs um and then what you want to do now you actually facilitate it this is what we're talking about wait we just do the same slide twice on action no sorry there we go there we go um so this is the case study there's different ways to do it and I want to make sure so you can do the public lease and private agreements but then you can also just do it through park mobile so Jason found this this is a great example we work there is that in Asheville why isn't this moving this is not me I'm just gonna go like this there we go um what happened was in Asheville they found out that part private parking um or private owners were actually contracting with park mobile to offer parking to the public that they were getting the revenue they weren't doing it through the through the city at all it was just happening the city found out and what then and then rather than saying no stop they actually embraced it and they started tracking it so that it became part of the overall parking the other added benefit is that there's you kind of reduce the bureaucracy or like how like if it's public and you're gonna share revenue for instance with the private now it's gonna have to come to the town and then it's gonna have to then be paid out if you if you allow the or if privateers decide to enter into this they're gonna get direct payment from the mobile operator so this is a way that there's like the incentive for actually property owners to actually make some money on this valuable land that people are not actually getting any money from right now while also providing additional parking within the downtown so the ideal way would be then for exactly what happened in Asheville to track this so when you know that this is happening work with park mobile so that it gets a specific code that's like the shared code but then those spaces are being allocated through that it's just a really great great way to incentivize it but also provide this again without having to invest a lot one great thing that you could do though the the town could kind of partner with having I would say uniform signage so that people understand that this lot is actually for public use at a certain hour make sure that it's very clear the hours that it's available and that's a just I don't know I think it's a far more effective way to actually increase this without actually adding too much burden on anybody and this isn't working anymore so I'm gonna go here so questions on the shared parking ideas yeah Catherine Porter in your study did you actually determine what private lots would potentially be good sources for parking you have a count on how many lots are 20 would hold 20 versus 30 versus four and we did not do that at this part yet I think that's something that first you have to embrace the idea of do you want to do a public shared program at that point it's very easy to do I mean every within our inventory every single parking lot is has been provided the number of spaces so it's just a quick like honestly download the spreadsheet see which lots have 20 or more 20 or less and then that's how you break it down so yes it's all in there it just we didn't want to go into making too many maps and stuff before you're even in agreement but that's something you want to do all right so you know thank you again Matt you know there's still quite a lot to get through there's eight goals you know we'll try to focus our time on you know what you know we feel the most valuable goals and I will say some of the most interesting stuff comes at the very end so please do bear with us but we want to be you know as as transparent as possible so this is goal four so one thing that we noticed in analyzing your parking system is that employee parking is an issue especially for service employees retail employees individuals like that who may not have access to a dedicated parking spot for their job or you know they're coming in if you're a restaurant employee coming in for the dinner shift you know where are these individuals parking so it seems like right now a lot of them may actually be feeding meters which means that they're taking up some of these very important on-street spaces that ideally are actually being used by customers so that was something that we noticed you know again in a lot of areas of town you know and previously all I believe all areas of town you were ending your meter enforcement at 6 p.m. that means you show up to work at 4 p.m. pay two dollars to you know feed that meter for a little bit and then you're kind of in and you're taking up that space rather than than a customer so we don't want to make parking harder for employees we just want to make sure that there's a balance and that everyone is using the options that are that are most appropriate for them so the goal here is to move to what we're calling a more user-friendly accessible and predict predictable parking permit program so this is all about those town center permits and we'll break that down into a few different strategies that we feel can enhance that system and and you know really address this employee parking issue so the first one strategy 4a refine the town center permit program to better meet the needs of downtown stakeholders so the first step of you know in this process is taking this town center permit and rather than having it be a seasonal thing which originally I believe was the bias to deal with more university related transportation issues make this an all year permit so the town center permit for those of you who are not familiar anyone who lives or works within the downtown district is able to pay for an annual or in this case right now a seasonal permit which entitles them to park in those permit spaces you know that only is regulated until 5 p.m. then they're open to anyone so we're not recommending any changes to that beyond make it an all-year thing make it consistent make it something that that parking is always there and secure for those employees who want to use it or those residents who want to use it we don't we want to take some of the variability out of it the next step is consider you know expanding this area look at nearby employers who maybe aren't included in the area right now but who might want to be who have employees that would want to actually utilize this I know the Dickinson Museum was one example that came up but continue to you know work with those stakeholders to make sure that all the people that may want to use this permit actually do have access to it you know some future considerations right now there's plenty of permit spaces still open that's not a concern if you did start to hit that 85 threshold you know right now the permit is highly inexpensive if you started to get to a point where you're not actually able to meet the permit demand you would want to think about increasing that cost we're not proposing doing that now so for anyone who does use that permit that's not something that's being discussed now just as a longer term consideration we wanted to put that out there the other step would be moving to a virtual permit system so rather than relying on these stickers that you have to come get and put in your car every every year it would all be managed through a license plate reader the town would just have your license plate on record and know that you're you know legal to so that's sort of the core strategy for what we're thinking in terms of the town center permit so moving on to the next one we you want to make sure that your other regulations are actually allowing this permit program to thrive because right now that permit really is the very best option for those downtown employees to have a consistent and reasonable place to park so in order to make that happen we are going to recommend that you continue to enforce meters to 8 p.m. but we want to make sure that that's happening consistently throughout town right now you have some areas until 8 some until 6 I think that's confused a lot of people people have run into issues make it consistent that's that's a big lesson here you know obviously there are upsides and downsides to the 8 p.m. enforcement you will have to pay those meters the whole way out until 8 p.m. however with that 8 p.m. enforcement you're most likely going to have far fewer employees who are actually willing to pay to feed that meter every time especially if you move to that graduated pricing that we talked about earlier because that's going to get significantly expensive for them and there's a massive cost savings for them to just take the permit that's going to mean more available spaces for your customers which is something we really want to prioritize obviously you know it seems like other towns in the area maybe they're not enforcing to 8 p.m. a lot of them are going to 6 p.m. we're aware that you know it's certainly something we're considering but we really feel that especially given that your overall parking peak is at 7 p.m. you know it's going to be really tough to effectively manage parking if you're not actually enforcing beyond 7 p.m. so that's that's our thought process there that's that's exactly right and then you know the other piece of that is as Matt already highlighted you know those permit spaces after 5 p.m. they are actually open to the public so at that point you know let's say the restaurant employees they've arrived before 5 p.m. so they're able to get that first space but then that's that's open and it's free and it's not being used right now so you know we want people to use that it all kind of plays into this system together so again a lot of these strategies kind of you know play into each other so just moving on you know the last piece of this section four here is really sort of that communication about this permit so you know you can see this graphic on the right here this is something the town actually made prior to our you know our study starting really documenting how much cheaper it is for someone to use that permit rather than paying a meter this is a great image this is something that we want to get in the hands of employees that they really know hey I can save a lot of money I just buy this permit you know the spaces are just around the corner I'm going to do that so in order to accomplish that continue to host information sessions work with the business improvement district work with these different stakeholders to make sure everybody knows this is out there and that they're really really using it so that's it for goal four you know we're happy to take questions on the permit system Rebecca hull our enforcement used to be six and then it switched to eight and I think a lot of residents didn't know that was going to happen it just kind of happened and we wondered what's going on with this and I've talked to many businesses that have said we don't like it because we feel that there are less people actually coming into town because of the parking and you just said that um that the peak times show that that's not true but I believe that's only on the weekends because during the week you showed underutilized parking between five and seven on your charts when you first I think the first section you showed that and then in addition to all that I want to say that I agree that it's not really in sync when with area other area towns so I'm wondering why everything is based on that eight PM when I'm I mean is this a done deal or I confused so yeah I'd be happy to you know talk more about that we know that this is you know you know sort of a difficult issue and people are definitely you know have different opinions about it this is certainly not a done deal again this is just our recommendation as parking management experts that you know it's going to really open up opportunities to better manage your parking if you do go to eight eight PM and I believe you know the chart that you're referring to the only underutilized parking from five to seven is the town center permit spaces actually the metered spaces and again you know after this you know we can talk more and we can pull up the charts again just to verify but your your peak I believe on the weekday there's two peaks there's one in the middle of the day and there's another one at seven PM it's not quite as high as the weekend peak but there is a seven PM peak both on that Thursday that we counted and and the Saturday so and then it's happening at at seven PM so you know again you know not a done deal we understand there are pluses and minuses we just feel that you know enforcing until eight PM as long as it's consistent across town and people are aware of it they understand it it's it's going to help you tackle that employee issue it's going to help you tackle some of these bigger utilization issues but we certainly understand the the drawbacks as well I think one other thing too is also when there's the I would say the impression that there's been less traffic in certain businesses I think it's really important to actually start tracking how has your retail environment changed over time so for instance back in the day I would say when there was far more I would say typical retail more like clothing stores things like that where there was a large larger percentage of that that tends to bring more people as it's switched to more of a service where people are going into restaurants going into places that will probably reduce some of that traffic so it's really also understanding what are the uses that are currently on the street that may be feeling like there's less traffic as opposed to it's it's a bigger picture but it's changing so quickly especially the retail environment it's a totally different world than it was even five ten years ago and it's continuing to be I would say a shift to more service based so we have to understand more than that but that's just one piece to understand as well. I'm Carol Johnson I'm the director of the Amherst Cinema I can assure you that my employees are not feeding the meter because they say they just can't afford to do it and what I have one point to make and then one question the point is that Amherst competes with many places that charge nothing for parking restaurants that are in outlying areas that have free parking the mall etc so what about that and the the fundamental question is do you really have evidence that employees are feeding meters evidence or is that I mean how how have you established that because it's not not my experience at all right that you know again every every business is is different every business has different needs you know again we're we're not able to stand here and say yes we have absolute proof that this is happening x percent of time where you know we can't we can't say that but we have learned from speaking with various stakeholders that they have heard from their employees that they feel like they need to do this or that's what they are doing or that they're not aware of the town center permit and they're not using it things like that I can't tell you exactly how much or how often that's happening it's just something that that we have heard you know pre-consistently I think to speak to the other part of your question I think you're absolutely right I mean you do have to compete with areas that have free parking that's that's absolutely true you know I think the difficulty here is I mean your park your parking utilization issue is it's almost like it's a good issue to have your parking is full because people want to be here they want to come here they want to go to these restaurants to these businesses that's why that's happening so the flip side of that is it's creating a problem because it's so popular that now people they're they're kind of having trouble finding you know a parking space right so you you want to strike that balance between the popularity that you have and this understanding that people really do want to come here they're willing to pay for parking that's why it's crowded and and you know again there there's pluses and minuses you're absolutely right there will always be places with free parking in a downtown managed parking environment you just can't afford to to have free parking now there are a couple of supplemental strategies that we're going to get to they're coming up that I think can play into this and that's parking validation and potential valet systems as well we'll talk more about that but I think if there's a concern about people not coming here because they don't want to pay for parking parking validation could be in you know fantastic way to to help out with that so we'll get we'll get into that more I also want to counter the idea that parking is free anywhere so when you talk about there's free parking when you go to say the mall that parking is being built into the least prices of those restaurants I'm sorry but when you go to many of the the chain restaurants these bigger I'm not going to name any they're not cheap they're often more expensive than the local restaurants and that's because a lot of them are not like yours like like I would say you know if you're going to like I'll say if you're going to like a fast service but you're are paying for that parking believe it or not it's just put into the price of what you're of what you're actually paying for that's just general math in terms of the way they actually have lease rates because they have to pay for the management and the plowing and everything of that parking so there are different pieces in some ways you can look at here you're paying for that for the maintenance of it as well the other piece is that where those free parking that we're talking about are they tend to be strip malls and mall people are coming to downtown because there's an environment here if you keep paving it over and adding surface lots now you're creating a essentially like a suburban shopping mall that's not why people are coming to downtown Amherst it is also about the environment and that cost that there are some costs that come that are incurred by that so I think that it's not always as simple as everything it's like people think the roads are free they're not free we pay for that in taxes we do all these kinds of things so there has to be ways to pay for all these various upkeep so it's it's a much bigger I would say macro and micro and equation that but nothing really is ever free it's just baked into the cost of things just what we think of it. Orr and Niesensen is there any concern about your reason the hours to eight and increase in the rate is discouraging poor people and people in fixed incomes and only from coming into town. Yeah thank you I think we're certainly aware of that concern and we want to make sure that there is not an you know an equity issue in your in your parking system so the current parking system does have the more expensive dollar an hour spaces kind of in the poor and then a little bit further out you have 50 cent spaces so we would want to keep a similar model we would want to preserve those more discount spaces you know that are still really not that far from the center of town because we do want to have a more affordable option for people made yet a lower income level so we would absolutely want to keep that the advantage and we're talking about technology that can be really great with that too is that when you're using these payment systems you can actually pre-program like if so for instance there can be senior rates and things like that those are always options it depends on the level of the I would say of the technology in which you purchase so those are things to consider I know that where I had worked there are lower rates that are implemented for instance there's a resident rate versus like a visitor rate in places like that it just depends on what difference is you want to do but the more technology the better it actually can become and again just to quickly start you know continue to answer that you know I just want to highlight the fact that under that graduated pricing scheme we're not actually recommending increasing the rate that you have now we're just saying allow people to park beyond the current time limit at a higher rate but the the rate up to your current time limit of you know which is two hours in most places that should just stay the the same we're not recommending at this time to to increase that that's something in the future with that park you know by observing parking utilization a decision could be made at a later time but we're certainly not recommending that right now I sorry I had a question about the permits and and employees like at restaurants and it seemed I've never been one but it seems to me that many people in that situation may feel their job is not permanent for a year can they buy a permit for six months or three months or is that possible thank you for bringing that up because that reminds me that I forgot to mention that part so thank you we would absolutely recommend you know moving to most likely a quarterly system for that it'd be in effect all year but it would renew on a quarterly basis because you're absolutely right some of this these employees are seasonal so you wouldn't want to lock them in to an annual permit when you know maybe they only need three or six months okay so that's it let's move on to goal five so this is really all about technology here so right now you know you have various different parking payment technologies you've got park mobile you got your kiosk and then you have of course those coin meters on the street so what we want to do for you is you know move to a parking technology that enhances your availability and your performance and just general convenience we want people to pay in as many different ways as possible as consistently as possible throughout town and the other thing that this can help you do is is track your utilization data more easily and streamline your your enforcement system so I'll just get right into the first strategy so you know I'm sure you're all familiar with these kiosks we would propose that maybe not in the immediate term but looking a little bit further out convert those on-street meters to kiosks so that gives you a lot more flexibility in how people can pay and how data can be tracked it's consistent with what you're already doing in your off-street lots another thing it would allow you to do is potentially you know remove painted stalls if you wanted to allow people to just sort of maximize that parking efficiency because they're just you know paying at that kiosk it's not based on a specific space and that's really all there is to it for that one I mean we feel there are a lot you know there's a lot more flexibility a lot of advantages with that sort of payment technology and of course that works with park mobile as well so moving on license plate readers are something that we really advocate for as well particularly on the enforcement side this makes it very easy for enforcement you know personnel to quickly scan through a lot or on-street it can deal with both permits and park mobile and however you pay for your parking spot you can handle all of that and make it a lot easier to sort of formalize some of these enforcement practices rather than sort of going about and just checking things here and there it allows you to be very consistent there is an upfront cost for that and you know we're aware that there are you know joint procurement programs that you can actually use to to make that a little bit more affordable for the town and then moving on here to the last piece we want to use technology to really enhance communication efforts in general whether that's real-time availability or other options particularly in some of your larger lots there are technologies that can allow you to post availability in that lot online right on this map which you already have today you already have an interactive web map for parking another thing we want to highlight here is you'll notice only the metered parking is visible on this map those town center permit spaces are totally not there and that's a critical part of your parking system both for the permit holders themselves and people who don't realize oh I can actually park there completely for free after 5 p.m. that actually goes back to that that equity issue as well you actually have after 5 p.m. this totally free parking right in the center of town that's that's not being used so you know we think that that type of enhanced communication and enhanced information for people coming here to use really all their parking options that could be a really key benefit for you as well so I know we kind of breeze through that one but we'll take questions on that thanks um so and honestly it's not a question about 0.5 but just quickly I don't fully understand how I'm you know I'm sure you explain this but how raising the number of hours you can park somewhere will help turnover if the problem is there's not enough spaces great yeah I'd be happy to talk about that more because because we are you know we want to make sure that we we hit home with that with that system so what we're proposing is that you continue to to you you remove time limits but you use pricing to encourage people to move along after a certain amount of time so right you know let's say there's a current currently there's a two-hour time limit so up to two hours you just pay your normal dollar an hour but after that you start to pay a lot more per hour maybe you you're paying two dollars an hour or three dollars per hour we're not recommending specific rates at this time but the idea is that only the individuals who really really want or need to be there for a longer amount of time are going to be willing to pay those higher rates and for everyone else it's just the added convenience of knowing oh I came here to do something that's going to take me two and a half hours and then instead of being scared away from a two-hour parking spot they know that they can just pay that extra you know extra dollar to get in for the for the time that they need but you would the you know to encourage that turnover as you're mentioning you have to make sure that the rate continues to go up the longer you stay to encourage that movement it's also as we were saying there's this incredible amenity called the town permit spaces that are free after 5 p.m by adding the increase of the cost of that it actually may people who want to choose to not pay and have a free space will be more likely to go to those areas that's why it's about communicating that those spaces are available as well so you're giving people a choice it's not that you don't have any parking available right now your metered spaces are very full your unregulated spaces there is availability your town center permit areas especially after 5 p.m there is availability so what the whole thing is is that you're pricing to reduce people's time at those spaces to increase turnover at those key convenience spaces while providing those other options those lower costs and in this case free options further away so that people who do not want to pay there is parking and the reality is this is not a huge downtown even these spaces are not far you are still within a two to three minute walk at most for most of these spaces so it's about communicating and getting people to understand I like to use this analogy you go to a mall I got parking right next to the door the store you're going to is down the hallway about four or five minutes you still have to walk really far it's it's all of this a lot of it is psychological so you really have to think about how you're communicating your entire parking system what it actually means to walk a block which is also good for you just want to say and then to to not say that just because you cannot find a space in front of your desired location does not mean there's no parking that is really critical it's all about how you look at it and that the fact that there are options just um hi are there so I mean I believe that there's currently some of the meter spaces that are tied into park mobile is that correct like I've seen the stickers on some of them do you know what percentage of the meters have that capability right now I mean I do think that's a really valuable tool and I know like throughout downtown Northampton they have that absolutely and you know correct me if I'm wrong but I believe all of the spaces work for mobile I mean just because you mentioned it as like a recommendation so I didn't know if all of them were tied in or not sure sure yeah they currently are all tied in I mean I think there are some more advanced features which we're going to talk about shortly that you can use with park mobile that aren't currently being used like that parking validation and the shared parking that Matt already mentioned it's it's a really really critical tool for the town so you know we do want to to advocate for it as much as possible I just have a I have a quick question on the permitted spaces that are free after five how does the kiosk know that there is not a car in that space if there's no technology at that space yeah so so again that while under your current technology I believe those permits are all enforced by hand someone has to actually go out and see that you visually you know have that sticker in the future system that we're proposing you don't need a kiosk on those streets if you have license plate readers and you move to a what we call a virtual permit system there's no stickers anymore the town just has a record in that system of your license plate and when the license plate reader scans it it says oh this person you know has a town to permit so they're they're legally parked here so that would be the few no no that so so I should have expanded on it the license plate readers can be either a handheld unit or something mounted on a vehicle and the you know it might be a police vehicle or some other vehicle it can just drive down the street and it will scan all the license plates along as it goes down and flag any that you know our parks there we go we have about 15 minutes left on our schedule I know Matt and Jason we're willing to hang out and I'm going to hang out afterwards too so they're still going to take a couple questions after each one but we're going to try and I'm going to probably cut it off sooner rather than later just so they get through the entire presentation I'm also available my information's on the parking website the downtown parking working group web page feel free to email me questions and comments at any time and I can if I don't know the answers I can reach out to Jason and Matt but I just I want to be respectful of everybody's time and understand that this was scheduled till seven o'clock so thank you Jeff appreciate that yeah that again there's a lot to cover I'll try to be you know you know relatively brief with these last few but we do want to cover everything to the extent possible so goal six this is all about making your parking customer friendly that's a big priority here we notice that some of your existing enforcement policies your existing parking policies not exactly customer friendly again as we've noted you know you're not enforcing to consistent hours throughout town that's confusing for customers we're aware of these issues so our goal is to implement programs that make parking enamors more inviting and more convenient overall to customers so I'll get into some of the the ideas that we have regarding that so first is this parking validation system that we've mentioned already a couple times and I think this goes hand in hand with some of the other concerns about that 8 p.m. enforcement time so with that park mobile app that you have now that app comes with the functionality or business owners to offer a code to people that frequent their business that is going to validate their parking so if there's a concern about that cost this is a very easy way to manage that typically this would be something that you know the the business owners opt into they're willing to to pay to you know support that cost and then it's as simple as distributing those codes very easy to use for anyone that has the app you know you have all the technology in place already so there's really no other additional cost to this obviously you know the expectation is typically that the business owner is is paying you know to cover that cost but again it's ready to implement now so we think this could be a big part of a more customer-friendly system another part of this would be special events or something like meetings I know that's come up a few times you could offer codes to through this to validate for things like that as well so really anything that you would want to validate parking for you can you know already do it through this mobile app so really good strategy there and then moving on another thing that we think could help to tackle this issue is a shared ballet program so this is something you know possibly through the business improvement district or just a group of private business owners that band together creating a ballet program that they share making it easier for people to park you know they can pull up in front of the business they don't have to worry about parking somewhere if they're coming to Amherst for the first time you know the town could help to coordinate that although they wouldn't actually be running it themselves although if there was enough demand for something like this the town could in fact offer you know a part of a parking area that they own to actually be used for this ballet system but of course you wouldn't want to do that unless you know that the demand is there but it's it's certainly a possibility and then moving on you know we want to make sure that the enforcement itself is is really customer friendly so we like to call this a a parking ambassador model so rather than you know having enforcement officers who are out there their real job is just to issue citations parking ambassadors are actually out there to offer information for visitors for people who are coming from out of town they may not know where to park ambassadors are there to show you hey here's where you could legally park here are your different options here's how the payment system works here's a map things like that there are other elements of this as well offering first time forgiveness we think is important typically if people are coming to a new place they might make a mistake they might park in the wrong spot should they really be penalized for that you definitely want them to come back to town to continue to frequent these businesses so that's very important another thing would be formalizing you know an eight minute grace period I think the enforcement officers are already basically doing that I don't think they're running out there to you know ticket someone as soon as they're five seconds over but you would want to make that a formal policy that you don't issue a citation to someone until they've parked over by you know eight minutes you want to be consistent about that again this would involve some retraining of the enforcement staff maybe some rebranding but you know moving to a to a model like this can be very very effective yeah it's it's you know it's certainly more difficult with the coin meters to understand and track that time whereas exactly with the kiosks it's very easy for the enforcement staff to do that so that's it for goal six any questions on goal six if you don't have a park mobile app because you don't use the cell phone will you be penalized in terms of you know having that validation yeah I think that's an important question I think you know the reason we're highlighting the park mobile validation is because it's very easy to implement the town and business owners together to do that right now but there are other ways to do parking validation too so again I you know I believe most kiosks are able to do something like that as well so again it would be a matter of the town working with their vendors to provide that technology to understand how that validation system would work and then talking to the business owners to say hey you know here's something if you're interested you can offer validation here's how you do it so it's not it's not you know just park mobile although that is perhaps the easiest way so just to clarify when you're talking about the validation by the business owner they are going to absorb the cost of that hour or two hours it's not going to be something that the town will forgive because it's a local business owner that's you know that's the typical model I don't think we have a you know discreet recommendation on exactly how to fund that system you know there are there are a variety of ways that may be the typical model but of course if you move to a park and benefit district that would be a potential way to fund it or you know the business improvement district if business owners want to band together to to fund it that way those are all options so we're not recommending you know oh it has to be on the business owners that's just a typical model and no and of course all of these including the eight minute grace period on the old fashion meters if you will those are all based on using the technology and the apps that are on everybody's smartphone therefore sort of negating the community that doesn't have smartphones not not those are not so that the eight minute grace period and the other enforcement protocols those don't require you to use park mobile okay that can all happen with your your other technologies as well I mean we are advocating to invert your you know pure point operated meters to kiosks because it does give you a little bit more flexibility but you certainly don't have to have a smartphone to to get your eight minute grace period and ostensibly a business could hand you a code and you would scan it at the kiosk and it would give you that payback or however you're describing it correct okay and the last question I had is your valet concept is that that's a stable one location valet service not valet is sort of placed all over town yeah again that you know we we're proposing that as an idea and trying to give some models of how it could work again it's going to come down to the individual needs of those businesses that are participating you know the town could sort of serve in a coordination role and if they're you know if there's big demand again they could offer up a parking area even to use to use it but you know that's kind of the level of of that so onto goal seven so this is all about your wayfinding your signage your lighting other aspects of your downtown environment that really play into where people are willing or able to park so we feel this is very important the goal here is to improve your wayfinding and signage so it's intuitive so that people are willing to park two blocks down the street and not feel like they don't know where they're going things like that so I'll just get right into it so the the key here with your signage is make sure it's highly visible and make sure it's consistent and that doesn't just mean consistent around town it means consistent with your online materials it means that anything related to Amherst parking it's got the same colors the same fonts the same style to it so that people immediately see that and they know where to go and it needs to work for both people in their cars who are looking to park as well as once you get out of your car you need to figure out where we're going to so both aspects of that are really really important you know right now we we pulled some pictures here of some of your existing you know you may be familiar with some of these areas you can see there's some you know different colors different types of signs there's this I think this is a favorite here this alleyway you know it's one of the critical pathways to get back to your your biggest parking area and obviously that doesn't look very inviting so you know it's just little things like that that are easy to pass by but they actually make a big difference to the user experience so all of these locations here are areas that we're we're calling out to sing these are key locations to put signage we're not here today to tell you exactly what colors what what does that signage look like but these are the spots you need to make sure that anyone whether it's in a car or on foot they can tell where parking is and they can tell where their you know favorite destinations are around town really really important absolutely I remember we were walking around and we saw we actually didn't understand what was happening we saw that sign so again just just being consistent and as clear as possible so you know here are some examples of signs that we think obviously these are from all different cities they're not you know consistent with one another but anything you can do to show real-time availability maybe in some of your bigger lots or if you see up in the you know upper left there there's actually I know it's a little bit difficult to read but it's actually showing the entire day it's showing how this space is regulated at different hours so say your town center permit you could have a sign out there that shows you okay from eight to five need a permit and then from five onward it's free anyone can park there just little things like that that make it totally clear at any time of day what you're able to do and and how it works so you know the other part of this beyond the signage is really the lighting the pedestrian infrastructure and just general safety amenities so I think you know another reason people may not be using those town center permit areas is they don't feel comfortable doing so the lighting is not always so great on some of those side streets we want to call out those areas and say you know those streets really should be looked at for improved lighting so that people feel like hey this is somewhere I'm actually supposed to park not somewhere that's like off limits at night especially for those nighttime employees that's that's a big deal you know beyond that just ensuring that you have crosswalks in your key locations coming to and from your biggest parking lots making sure your sidewalks are well maintained all of those things can really be contributed to also through that parking benefit district that's another reason why we feel that could be so beneficial you can fund those improvements directly with with parking revenues so we're almost done we've got one more goal but we'll take questions on goal seven quickly well actually I'm not sure that this is a question but I have noticed that a lot of the permit parking spaces you can hardly get to them you can't even open up your driver's door because there's so many bushes on the side I assume that could be part of a program to clean up those spots yeah I absolutely think that could be part of it I mean a lot you know a lot of these side streets there are private homeowners there so of course you need to be cognizant of some of their needs maybe not all the streets certainly but I believe on some but regardless of what the uses are next to the street you know you have to be aware of their needs as well but yeah you want to do everything you can to make it as easy to get in and out of those those areas. Hi so just in terms of the kiosks for the parking I mean it's it would be great if there could be this sort of question too but in terms of the lighting like some of the current ones are really poorly lit and I know that's come up as an issue for many people that you can't even really see well at night also in terms of the accessibility of the kiosks like I don't know if they're available at different heights and so on for people because it seems like most of the ones I've seen are pretty high so thank you yeah that that's very important you know I don't know if we've explicitly heard the issue of lighting of the kiosks until right now so thank you for bringing that up that's very very important if you can't use the kiosk because it's too dark or it's not accessible for you that's obviously a big issue so you know thank you for raising that and we'll continue to to look at that as a key issue all right so I think you know with that I'll move on to the final goal here this is goal eight you know we think this is an important goal as well so again this relates back to that key issue of your overutilized public parking we've already talked a lot about that but this goal is all about how can you actually add new parking how can you add more parking more facilities and when should you do so so we you know because of the expensive parking we don't want to come out and say okay start adding parking now you want to track that utilization as as Matt already discussed make sure that you're surpassing 85 percent a lot consistently that's the moment when you can start to say okay now maybe we really need to think about how we can construct parking the other big part of that is working with developers and other you know private individuals to to help do so and and help fund that so that's going to be our focus on on this goal so before we get into the the bigger facility you know sort of ideas we want to talk about some smaller design interventions that can be helpful so right now your stalls for your on-street spaces are 22 feet they don't need to be that long you can easily get away with 20 feet based on modern vehicles that's going to get you you know almost 10 percent more spaces obviously there's some variations based on where curb pets are things like that but that's a very easy thing to do it's going to gain you more spaces so we would absolutely recommend doing that again you know shifting to kiosks maybe that's a little bit further away if you wanted to and you know this isn't going to work everywhere but you could actually eliminate the striped stalls completely let people park as close together as as possible on these on-street blocks that may gain you a few more spaces as well and then the other part of this is off-street facilities or you know whether they're public or private if there are things that you can do to coordinate between private surface parking lot owners who may be next to each other is there an opportunity for them to work together change the configuration of those lots add more spaces the town can participate in that process or if there was a you know shared lease agreement to use that as public parking even perhaps participate in some of the funding aspects as well so looking for those opportunities for example this is is boltwood garage from you know an aerial view here we noticed there's a lot of extra pavement in some of these areas you could certainly you know we feel add additional spaces you can see that yellow highlighted area that's an opportunity so it may not gain you a whole lot of spaces but given how few options you have to actually add to your space count little things like that they can be really really important so we wanted to call that out as well so you know next is this you know sort of bigger idea here how can we actually add new new parking facilities well a lot of this is going to come down to public private partnerships because of how expensive parking is you want to look at what developers are doing and and work with them to to meet both their needs and and the town's broader needs developers when they're they're adding residential units they're adding parking they obviously understand that parking is necessary and more parking is necessary so we're recommending that the town continue to track development opportunities continue to work with those individuals to see who's interested in adding to the parking supply can it be shared parking and what can we actually do on a policy level to promote that so we we've also called out a few areas here that we think make the most sense if you were going to construct a new parking facility whether it's it's public or private so boltwood garage area obviously it's not you know given its orientation and its size it's not a perfect area but it is centrally located people are familiar with it you also have the north and south common lots again centrally located is there perhaps an opportunity there to go underground you know and and add parking there so that's something that it's one of the rare places where you actually have a little bit more space then we have this north pleasant street lot also known as the cbs lot again that's centrally located it's a little bit bigger a little has a little bit more room to work with than bullwood you know that's something that you would want to look at as well and then there are some smaller ones the amenity street lot we notice there's some private lots next door is there an opportunity to consolidate those again i don't want to dwell too much on on these but we wanted to highlight that there are some areas that may actually make sense you know for additional parking facilities so with that i'm just going to move into the last strategy here which relates directly back to what we were just talking about right now there are no parking requirements at all in the downtown district so that can help to promote development it's a good thing the most part what we're realizing is given how highly utilized your parking system is that may not be feasible for much longer so there's something that we call access management requirements which the town could implement to try to actually leverage those developer dollars to either construct more parking or make other mobility improvements downtown so you can think of this sort of as a parking requirement but it can be satisfied the remains other than actually building new parking as well so for example a developer comes in this requirement says okay you need to provide 10 spaces for this well if they say okay we'll make eight spaces but they're going to be shared spaces they'll get a little bit of a bonus it'll help them to meet that requirement and it helps everyone else because now there's more shared parking they could also help meet that requirement by adding or paying for bike facilities or new bus stops or a bike share station or you know adding zip cars or other shared cars at their new development what we want to do here is encourage those developers to actually improve mobility in general whether it's through parking or other means you know another option here is that they just pay directly a per space fee to that parking benefit district so they say okay I really don't want to build parking but I'm you know I'll pay X amount per space to satisfy that requirement and again we're not proposing what that rate would be but this is something that's been implemented in other towns and has worked really well so you know here's a table just showing some of the you know potential points requirements for different types of uses you know we don't really need to dwell on the the specifics of each use but so before I guess before we move on you know I know that this last piece can be a little bit confusing it's a little bit of a new concept so I do want to take questions on that before we we wrap up at this kind of payment um to a facility that was already built I wanted to differentiate between a proposal could you do it also through the permitting system that the residents in that facility couldn't get a permit unless the building paid a per space fee so that the building is paying and the person is paying a permit providing they have a license plate so in existing can you if they built with the idea they didn't have to provide parking can we come in after the fact and do it or do you need to do it before development goes in yeah so so typically um this policy in place prior to that development review over to make sure that they are contributing into the system uh and to your other question um you know I think the permits certainly play a role in this we haven't drilled down to you know specifics of what exactly this would look like in Amherst but I think if a developer was to say okay I'm not going to provide as much parking as you're asking but I'll subsidize the permit cost for all my tenants who want that something like that um that would make sure that they're actually providing um you know they're they're still promoting use of the parking options that are here so yeah oh I see I see yeah absolutely so right now we're not recommending changing the town center permit payment structure right now it's the same payment whether you're a resident any type of resident or or an employee however there's certainly an opportunity if you were to continue to do your utilization counts at some point in the future you're finding um you know that one group or another is is taking up you know too many parking spaces too much impact you could charge a different rate for employees versus residents I think it's a little bit tougher to say that you're going to charge more um for residents of a new development a larger building versus residents who were there before I think that there's not much of a basis and again that could be an equity issue as well so that is a question that it certainly comes up because these bigger buildings there is a concern about the impact that they could have on on-street permit parking but again we just don't really feel there's there's a basis to really charge those individuals a different rate versus someone else there's many different strategies you can do you can limit the number of permits that are issued per unit for instance so that you know you can limit it to one or two and therefore you're not going to have you know if you have like large roommate situations with three or four people which can often be an issue when especially in towns that have colleges and universities you can limit the number so that's it you can have that requirement that you must have your car registered within the municipality in order to receive that permit you can have a more robust visitor permit program where to reduce the additional parking that's coming to that house by issuing only a certain number of visitor permits that's what you want to do when you're tracking above when you really start hitting that parking you know utilization of over 85 where it's just difficult to find parking everywhere right now you don't have that you are you definitely have availability on those side streets it's just I think you have to communicate what it is but to have those strategies lined up for when you hit them that's how you start to address it when it comes to afterwards you just want to do uniform changes to your permit program because it's going to be the similar thing it's people who just need that on-street space so if you can have those strategies that create an equitable system excuse me an equitable system but then do have those you know restrictions in place you could also do something like the first permit is the same price now second permit is going to be double the third permit is going to be $200 many communities do that in some place you go to the west they're starting to charge three four hundred dollars a month I mean it's not a month three four hundred dollars a year for a resident parking permit so there's just there's a lot of different pricing strategies you can use for that as well because the idea of not providing parking is to create more walkable you know I would say alternative to driving that's part of the idea so I actually commend you for that it's a really really great strategy to reduce I would say auto reliance so you want to make sure you have those part I would say those additional strategies that actually can supplement that thank you Matt yeah I hope that answers your question I mean I think you know again we didn't focus on some of those strategies tonight because again you don't have a utilization issue with your permits there's open spaces right now it's not a problem it certainly could become a problem you know some years down the line so that's when you would go you know you know one permit per residence or maybe to get a second permit it's double the cost you know things like that so with that you know we just have unless there's another question you know just some final wrap up here we want to kind of inform you about the rest of this process so we're going to take feedback from this meeting and incorporate it into the rest of our report we're going to deliver that final report as an implementation plan to town council and then at that point it's up to the town of Amherst and Amherst leadership to decide which of these strategies they want to move forward with and you know we'll help them prioritize that but again none of this is a done deal these are just our formal recommendations and it's up to the town to sort of decide what they want to move forward with first and how they they want to handle the details. After seven o'clock now so I'm going to wrap up again we're still here we're going to post this video recording to the website we're going to have the presentation we're going to have the draft recommendations up there so for folks watching online please email or folks in the room who didn't get question answered in person feel free to email me questions comments things that you heard that you liked things that you heard that you didn't like things that you think need to be addressed in the future all of those comments my emails on the website you can call me 413-259-3079 if you want happy to talk about it and thank you all for coming thank you to the downtown parking working group for all the work that you've done on this thank you to the counselors for coming and being engaged Matt and Jason thank you guys so much for all the work you've done so thank you very much