Clint Creighton, an ASU student living in Tempe, drives to downtown Phoenix once or twice a week to visit his girlfriend. He said he would visit more, but parking holds him back.
“Usually a majority of the trip is finding a spot,” Creighton said. “There’ve been times when I’m looking for a spot and I see three or four other cars circling around looking for a spot, too.”
Creighton is not the only downtown visitor who has difficulty parking. Caelen Demos, a journalism junior on the Downtown campus, drives downtown four days a week for class.
“The metered parking isn’t expensive compared to some of the paid lots, but it is difficult to find during the busy class times,” Demos said. “Sometimes I have to park in the paid lots when the meters are free because all of the metered spots are taken.”
The population of the downtown area has increased about 5 percent since 2010, according to a Downtown Phoenix Partnership demographic summary report. As the population increases, so does the need for parking.
Parking meters in particular are a hot commodity downtown. Sometimes, however, the Phoenix Street Transportation Department has to block off this resource through a process called “bagging.”
“The bagging of meters occurs for several different reasons,” said Matthew Heil, a public information officer at the Street Transportation Department. “It can happen because of some kind of construction or work that the city is doing in the street or in the vicinity.”
Bagging for construction can affect areas as large as city blocks. The business or city agency needing the blocked area works with the city to determine how long the spaces need to be blocked off.
“Some areas that have not had meters removed are basically permanently bagged for issues of homeland security,” Heil said.
Heil said many buildings have seen a reduction in parking because the parking’s proximity to buildings posed safety threats due to post-9/11 concerns.
“You can see bagging occurring if there are some large-scale events happening,” Heil said. “We do things like marathons where there’s going to be foot traffic on the street. We typically remove parking for that as well.”
Connor Descheemaker, a junior studying urban and metropolitan studies, served as a project administrator for the Sustainable Communities Collaborative, a nonprofit development fund that deals with transit-related development.
As a resident of downtown Phoenix, Descheemaker bikes, walks and drives in the area. The heart of the problem lies not in a shortage of parking, Descheemaker said, but in conflicting needs and expectations.
“If you compare just straight numbers of the amount of parking that downtown Phoenix has compared to every single downtown in the nation, we have more than any other city,” Descheemaker said. “The issue is that it’s not available all the time.”
A 2006 parking study performed by Walker Parking Consultants to assess overall parking trends in the downtown area found that 90 percent of both the on- and off-street public available parking was used. The study explains that it is an “industry accepted standard” that city parking is most efficient when occupancy runs from 85 to 95 percent.
Private, off-street parking, which is less readily available to visitors, only operated at 85 percent occupancy in 2006, according to the study.
“Understand what a city is like compared to a suburb,” Descheemaker said. “You’re going to, by nature, have a different parking situation. You cannot place the car as the primary means of getting from place to place. It’s a different situation, not better or worse, just different.”
Downtown Phoenix’s population is growing, so a higher demand for parking is being met with less and less space to build it.
“I think one way to balance that is focusing on how you can mix uses,” Descheemaker said. “That could be building a parking lot that is underground of a residential, commercial or office space. Or, vice versa, you could have retail or office space with parking above it.”
Marathon runners may not share the roads with parked cars, but Descheemaker said sharing in other areas could serve as a helpful solution.
“It’s all about convincing developers to look at how we can better share resources,” Descheemaker said. “When there is a large demand for parking, all those parking garages that are sitting empty can be used for those sorts of things.”
Demos said she is pleased with the progress to add credit-card parking meters in the area.
“The parking situation can be frustrating, but I think downtown has taken positive steps towards making parking more user-friendly,” Demos said. “Last year they added credit-card machines to the meters so that patrons don’t have to constantly dig for coins.”
The credit card-capable meters can be identified with a green stripe. The city will continue to work toward what Heil calls the “aspiration” of phasing all parking meters to card-capable meters, he said.
Credit card-capable meters cost approximately $500, while traditional, coin-operated meters cost about $350. When paired with the cost of installation labor, about $75, the cost to install more credit card-capable meters is significantly higher than the traditional alternative.
“Right now, the city is also dealing with a significant budget shortfall,” Heil said. “We’re probably not going to see a universal transition to those kinds of meters in the near future. We do definitely appreciate being able to offer that, because it is an easier way for people to transact their business, typically.”
These changes are being made in response to the needs of constituents in the changing downtown landscape, Heil said.
“Downtown Phoenix really is not the same place that it was 10 years ago,” Heil said. “We are having to change a lot of things beyond simply the parking meter arrangement. But the more comfortable people are with parking, especially in downtown Phoenix, the more likely they are to use it.”
Editor’s Note: Connor Descheemaker was Director of Community Initiatives with the Downtown Devil. He is no longer a member of the organization.
Contact the reporter at Alexandra.Long@asu.edu
