nothin Where Have All The Cars Gone? | New Haven Independent

Where Have All The Cars Gone?

Melissa Bailey Photo

Traffic tsar Travers.

Reading a new study released from the city, you can almost imagine tumbleweeds rolling through vacant parking spots as the city’s parking rate hits its lowest point in 10 years.

That surprise is revealed in the 2012 Point In Time Survey” released last month by Milone & MacBroom, a consulting group contracted by the city to study parking, biking, and walking in New Haven.

That trend — a plunging parking rate — contrasts with the dire parking picture presented in the version of the same study released last year. That would portrayed New Haven as soon to be overrun by cars, filling up 97 percent of parking spots on any given weekday.

Click here to read the 2012 report, and here for the 2011 report.

The latest survey, released Friday, was conducted on a single day in October 2012 The surveyers counted how many of 16,937 downtown parking spaces in garages, surface lots, and on the street were occupied, as well as how many cyclists and pedestrians passed through several key areas downtown. The survey found that 78 percent of parking spaces were occupied, the lowest rate in the 10 years the city has conducted the survey. Pedestrian and cyclist rates remained relatively flat.

The findings suggest that New Haven is no longer headed toward the parking Armageddon foretold in previous years’ reports.

Starting in the third quarter of 2012 and continuing through the second quarter of 2014, the downtown parking system will experience a noticeable parking crunch, with an estimated 97% of spaces to be occupied during the day,” reads the 2011 survey, in a dire warning that never came to pass.

What happened to all the cars? Why have so many parking spaces opened up downtown?

One answer: Maybe they haven’t opened up at all. The study might not present a fully accurate picture. On the other hand, some trends suggests that more people may have started hoofing it in the center city, hopping on bikes, or catching the bus.

City traffic tsar Jim Travers cautioned that point-in-time surveys don’t have the accuracy of consistent studies over a longer period of time. The parking pattern on the day of the study could have been anomalous, a fluke that doesn’t represent the true parking picture.

Anecdotal accounts — which are also unreliable — suggest that the study is off. A recent downtown campaign swing by mayoral candidate Matt Nemerson found several Chapel Street merchants who think the lack of parking is a top issue in town.

There is this sense that oh, no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded,” said Nemerson, channeling Yogi Berra.

Nemerson,who chairs the New Haven Parking Authority, agreed that point-in-time-surveys are an imperfect science,” but offered several reasons the survey may be on to something. There’s been an increase in the supply of parking and decrease in demand, he said.

Yale has built a number of parking garages, which is definitely taking people out of the system,” Nemerson said. He said parking authority garages have seen a slight decrease in demand for transient” spaces — that is, spaces paid for by the hour versus by the month.

I think people have become creative,” Nemerson said. Parking is a very dynamic market, and people, I think, are moving to some of the new off-street locations.”

Downtown also now has more housing, which is decreasing demand, Nemerson said. Travers pointed out that 360 State, the large apartment tower downtown, has filled up. Maybe more people live downtown instead of commuting there, he speculated.

Travers offered a couple of other theories about why more parking spots might be open. He said CT Transit has seen a 6 percent increase in bus ridership; also more people are riding Metro North and the Shore Line East trains. He also pointed out that while overall bike counts went down slightly in the 2012 survey, the morning bike counts were up. That might indicate that more people are commuting to work by bike, he said.

Matt Feiner, who owns the 12-year-old Devil’s Gear Bike Shop downtown on Orange Street, said more people are riding bikes. Our repair business is always up. Every year it’s been up.”

I know a lot of people are complaining about how much it costs to park,” Feiner said. Maybe people are not parking downtown or finding other ways into town, or parking in outlying neighborhoods and walking in.”

I think there’s more people taking multi-modal transit options into the city,” Travers said. But it’s very hard to tell long-term effects from a point-in-time study.”

Travers said his department has taken on a Yale intern — a math and statistics major — to study parking more carefully this summer. Travers said he’ll consider possibilities like reducing parking rates in outlying areas” to free up parking spaces in the core of downtown.

Predictions

The survey found that parking garages and surface lots had higher occupancy rates than on-street parking spots. Garages and surface lots were at 82 and 77 percent occupied respectively, while on-street spots were only at 61 percent.

The survey divided downtown into four different zones, and found that Broadway/Yale” had the lowest parking occupancy at 58 percent. South/West of Chapel” was the most crowded, at 86 percent.

With an overall parking occupancy rate of 78 percent, the city has dropped below the level of efficiency, the report warned. In urban areas such as downtown New Haven, parking utilization rates should be between 80 and 90 percent. Utilization rates below 80 percent suggest an inefficient parking system, that is, one with an overabundance of parking or overpriced parking. This can result in increased maintenance costs and decreased revenue and opportunity costs associated with using otherwise taxable land.”

The survey report includes a projection of parking supply and demand for 2013 to 2015, taking into account several expected developments: In late 2013 the parking lot at 10 Wall St. will be sold and developed; at the beginning of 2015, the Coliseum site will be developed, phasing out 471 parking spaces while increasing parking demand; a second Union Station garage will open at the end of 2015; development downtown, including at 205 Church St., will increase parking demand at the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014.

All told, projected parking utilization” will be around 80 percent until 2015, when it will rise slightly and then fall again to 79 percent, according to the report.

But the survey’s projections have been wrong before, of course.

This snap-shot’ survey is essentially a single data point and, as such, reliance on that single survey should be tempered,” the report states.

Meanwhile, New Haven has been engaged in a larger debate about how much (or little) parking to plan for as new development projects come on line. Read about that here.

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