Thread by @ncoxbarrett

It's Earth Day and what better way to celebrate Earth Day than a trip to the Zoning Ordinance Advisory Committee to discuss eliminating costly parking mandates, perhaps one of the greatest contributors to environmental destruction in US cities?

Today features Eric A Johnson Chief of Economic Development & Neighborhood Services to talk parking economics!

Today's committee meeting is going to be more of a Q&A session.

Chair Murphy: One thing that falls under your purview is curb management. We need direction on what the City's approach to this will be, especially around parking meters. Cites literature on how they are important part of parking mgmt.

ZOAC Bagley: To have walkability and access to transit, we have to have sidewalks. We want to hear about the sidewalk masterplan and connect into this discussion.

ACM Johnson: Agreed, needs to be a comprehensive discussion including Transit Oriented Development and nbhd context

ZOAC Rieves: If you had a choice, what 3 areas in Dallas should eliminate or reduce parking requirements.

Johnson: Below I-30 (Bold, I like it!). Then areas with existing commercial corridors. Says Red Bird area as an example.

Costly Parking Mandates are a huge negative, so why would we hang that millstone on any nbhd's neck?

Note: If forced to choose my areas would be Downtown, Uptown, Deep Ellum, Oak Cliff, Cedars. Basically just start downtown and draw bigger circles.

Now a representative from DART: Jack Wierzenski

Dart is talking up the bus network redesign.

Says the interaction with on street parking is the biggest issue for them

They had (i think) 3 different DART staff talking. One of them was a little disappointing: it almost sounded like he preferred costly parking mandates so cars would stay out of the buses way on the street.

DART was asked about all the many surface parking spaces it currently has. DART said they recently evaluated top sites and discussed providing the parking more compactly (i.e. in parking structures) which, to me, seems like REALLY selling your main offering short.

Then I Had to drop off for a bit, so I may have missed some more DART commentary. I returned during the best part of every city meeting: Public comment!

First comment I caught: Resident of Lower Greenville(ish) area wants to make sure that 1) We don't have lots of ugly meters on every space and 2) Any solution protects the "stable single family nbhd surrounding Lower Greenville."

I'll take that as "cautiously optimistic"!

Second comment: Lots of talk about San Francisco and other great parking-lite cities that he loves but says "We're not San Francisco" and taking DART takes longer than driving so let's not break what we have by removing parking requirements.

Note: A better future isn't possible.

DART staff 1: 58% of our riders don't own a car. 50% of them make less than $35,000 a year. These changes won't be hurting them.

DART staff 2: I take DART to work and it takes me 17 minutes. I bought my house in 1991 based on where DART was going to place a station!

Love it.

Maybe it happened on the part I missed, but I would have liked to hear from DART how parking requirements lead to dispersal and car dependency and are antithetical to DART's mission to provide mass transit to DFW and less about TOD and on-street parking complicating bus boarding.

That's a wrap. We're getting close to actual proposals. I'm excited. Good work staff and ZOAC. A better future IS possible and it looks like

1) Eliminating costly parking mandates
2) Charging the right price for on-street parking
3) Investing that $$$ back into the neighborhood!

For DART we need:
Rationalized operations (in-progress)
Real Bus lanes (???)
Automated enforcement (not sure how legal in Texas)