This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
On Wednesday, June 21, 2017, the Longmont Downtown Development Authority (LDDA) and the City of Longmont held an open house meeting on downtown parking strategies and proposed changes.
The open house started with a brief presentation by Kimberlee McKee, Executive Director of LDDA, regarding the parking and access study that was conducted by the LDDA, the City of Longmont, and Boulder County to analyze how much parking downtown has, how much turnover was occurring in certain zones, and where the parking hot spots were. The LDDA gathered data for the study through business owner meetings, stakeholder meetings, interviews with the city parking staff, interviews with LDDA staff, a Building Better Cities forum, and online engagement, of which they received about 800 responses between several months.
“So when you talk about a parking study and what we are doing, we’ve realized that there are certain hotspots and there are certain places in the downtown area where it is extremely hard to find parking when you need one. The perception is then that there is a parking problem throughout all of downtown. What we actually did find is that system wide, there is enough parking for our needs. It’s just not exactly in the area where we would want it to be, ” said Kimberlee McKee.
“What we’ve learned from our surveying and from talking to most people, we feel that we don’t have a parking problem, yet. But as we see downtown continue to grow and thrive we need strategies to get people here [downtown].”
Some of the proposed implementation strategies are to make consistent parking time limits throughout downtown, maximize parking spaces with striping and have visual cues, add additional parking, have more bike share options, explore how to add more diagonal spaces and back-in angle spaces, and explore private parking partnerships.
Proposed downtown parking changes to on-street time limits are to have 119 twenty-four hour parking spaces (down from 287), 190 3 hour parking spaces (up from 68), 636 2 hour parking spaces (up from 564), zero 1 hour (down by 25), and 12 30 minutes parking spaces (down from 13). These on-street spaces are from Terry Street to Kimbark Street and 2nd Avenue to Longs Peak Avenue. Time limits on weekdays would remain from 8am to 6pm.
Replacing on-street parallel parking spaces to angle parking downtown and next to Thompson, Roosevelt, and Collyer parks was also proposed. This change would add an additional 150 parking spots.
After the presentation was over, LDDA held an open forum where attending residents could ask questions and provide feedback regarding the proposed changes. Some of the comments and questions that were brought up include:
“Why do you have downtown district parking show in the historic neighborhoods instead of keeping it limited within the overall district? Why are you invading the residential neighborhoods with your parking?”
“If you have diagonal parking going from east to west, the trash trucks will have to be able to get out, cross the solid yellow line to turn out, a wide turn, and it’s dangerous. If you have diagonal parking in the residential areas, that will be extremely dangerous because people will have to be at the solid yellow line to turn."
“Why is there so little parking enforcement of the rules already? We are already experiencing problems…why is there no enforcement?”
“Educating drivers to drive slowly in the neighborhoods, to not pass inappropriately, to actually follow and enforce the speed limits in our neighborhoods could do a lot to solve the safety problems."
“I would encourage us to have a larger vision. My vision is something like this: I think there is opportunity to probably now really address the issue of parking structures and parking garages."
“Right now as a city, we are traveling down the same road as every other American small town has gone down, because it is natural if you’ve been driving to always want driving to be easier, but it turns out that that wrecks cities…The alternative is to reduce the convenience of driving downtown. 90% of the city lives within a 12 minute bike ride of where we are right now [Longmont Public Library].”
“What I am concerned about as Longmont grows is more of the speed in which people are driving and especially trucks also. I would encourage some more ways of slowing people down like speed bumps and signs."
Before and after the presentation, attending residents were also able to provide comments and feedback, via sticky notes, on display boards located throughout the meeting room that showed the proposed changes.
"How safe is back-in angled parking? Can we get lessons?"
"Reduce car parking - increase bike parking"
"How will street be wide enough?"
"Support strongly back-in angled parking"
"Institute paid permit systems in both west and east-side neighborhoods."
LDDA will continue to gather business and community input on the proposed implementation strategies. A City Council study session will be held on July 18, 2017 to discuss future parking and transportation philosophy, and some of the implementation suggestions will be brought to City Council mid to late August.
If you have any comments and/or feedback to provide the LDDA about the proposed parking changes, please contact them via email at [email protected] or by phone at 303-651-8484.
For more information, please visit the LDDA parking study, a map of current downtown parking, or the downtown master plan of development.
If you’d like to see the entire presentation, please visit our Facebook page or watch down below.
