Thomas Breen Photo
Doug Hausladen.
Doug Hausladen came to East Rock looking to make an elusive sale: a flexible parking space designed to bridge the gap between meter-wary merchants who need more on-street parking and neighbors who want to park their cars on the streets where they live.
Hausladen, New Haven’s transit chief, got permission to start selling these parking spaces more than a year ago, when the city amended the code of ordinances to allow for selling business restricted parking spaces on residential side streets.
Since then, Hausladen has pitched different neighborhoods on the idea. So far, no takers.
Monday night he made the pitch again, at a meeting of the East Rock Community Management Team at mActivity Gym on Nicoll Street.
He said the new business permit was inspired by a parking system already in place in Somerville, Mass. (See the video above for an explanation of how the Somerville system works.)
“Let’s say Street X has 100 parking spaces total,” Hausladen explained. “At night, 90 of them are taken up by residential parking. During the daytime, maybe 40 of them go to work, leaving a supply of like 50 parking spaces.”
With the written permission of a neighborhood’s alder, which is required for this system, the city can choose to sell access to a select number of those floating, available residential parking spaces for a set period of time each day. Customers would go to a portal on the city’s website and buy daily, weekly, monthly, or annual permits for a specific street.
According to the ordinance, annual permits cost $360, monthly permits cost $40, weekly permits cost $12, daily permits cost $3, and a 10-day booklet costs $25.
Although no neighborhoods have opted into this program yet, Hausladen said it would be a good way to boost the parking-related revenue that the city brings in while also working towards solving the dearth of public parking in the Upper State Street area.
Neighbors at Monday night’s meeting seemed tentatively interested in the proposal, if only as a source for additional revenue that might make its way back into the neighborhood.
Kevin McCarthy.
“If there was a proposal that part of the revenue stream go to parking enforcement, that might help” win neighborhood support, suggested ERCMT member Kevin McCarthy.
Hausladen asked the group to mull the idea over and bring him questions and concerns about the proposal by next month’s ERCMT meeting. No alders were present at Monday night’s meeting, and no one present expressed enthusiasm about the idea.
Hausladen said that the Board of Alders would ultimately get to decide how to spend any money that would come in to the city through this program. He said he would advocate for having some kind of special local transportation lock box for investing in projects like bus shelter maintenance and sidewalk bump-outs, as well as alternative transportation in the neighborhoods from which the revenue comes.
The article states that no alders were present at this regularly scheduled Management Team Meeting. Why was this the case?