Plan: Adjust Parking Fees By Hour, Demand

By this summer, how much you pay to park, particularly downtown, might depend on the time of day and how many other people want your space.

That’s the concept behind an idea pitched Thursday night by city transit and parking chief Doug Hausladen. Hausladen pitched a ​“performance-based pricing” pilot parking program during at a workshop of the Parking and Transportation Working Group at Career High School.

He raised the idea after listening to about an hour of parking concerns from Hill residents about the ongoing struggle between neighbors and Yale-New Haven employees, and from others about the battles between Yale University and neighbors and the lack of enforcement of residential zones. (Click on the video above about the problem.)

Hausladen said creating more residential parking zones — the city has created more in the last three years than it has in the previous 15 years — has alleviated some problems. But it’s not the total solution: The process for creating such zones is cumbersome requiring the coordination of an alder and constituents. And as neighbors pointed out, the city simply doesn’t have enough enforcement officers.

“But how do we do better,” he said. ​“To do better we have to get beyond parking.”

Right now, thanks to software used by his department, Hausladen can tell how much metered-parking is available on all of the city’s streets and in its garages. That’s 1,000 metered spaces and 18,000 parking garage spaces. But the price of parking is virtually the same throughout the city, no matter how much demand there is throughout the day. That means people might be overpaying for street parking when demand is low and not paying enough during times of the day when demand is at its height.

Hausladen wants to use that data to make sure that no block has more than 85 percent of its parking spaces filled at any given time, which boils down to at least two available parking spaces on each block.

To do that, he’d need a directive from the Board of Alders to that effect. If he gets that directive, he plans to begin raising and lowering the cost of parking by a quarter based on the demand throughout the day starting in July, he said.

That means higher rates in areas of the city, like downtown near City Hall where the demand for parking is highest between 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Under the proposed plan, the cost of parking in a street space during that time of day could cost as much as $3.50 an hour. But you’d also get relaxed time limits that allow you to stay in a space for two, five or 14 hours if you’re willing to pay a premium for it. Currently, there are spaces in the city where you are limited to as few as 15 minutes.

However, if you have the time and are willing to walk a block or two over where the demand is lower, the amount you pay for parking would be the same or lower and you’d still get the relaxed time limits.

Hausladen said the goal of the pilot would be to make parking less punitive by making it easier for people to find parking on street and in garages. It would also reduce the circling for parking that happens now because current pricing is the same everywhere and it encourages people to park as close as they can to their destination no matter what. It would last for about three years, which would allow the city to measure its performance.

If the idea doesn’t work, it’s back to the drawing board, said Hausladen, who also is the acting director of the New Haven Parking Authority. But if it does work, the idea could spread to other areas of the city like the Hill.

Several big cities have performance-based pricing parking programs. He said the city that is using it the best is Seattle, where such a strategy has been in place since 2010. (Click above for a video about Seattle’s parking.)

Hausladen said big cities like Seattle have big parking problems, but New Haven is a little city with those same problems. By using data to drive the coordination of on-street and off-street parking pricing, incorporating more relaxed time limits and better signage to help people understand what’s going on, the city could make parking quicker and more convenient, he said.

“The feedback we’ve gotten so far is do all the pricing together, do it incrementally,” he said. ​“Don’t do it all in one fell swoop.”

The proposed pilot would adjust the rates by the data that the city has. Then each quarter his office would evaluate whether the adjustments are having the desired effect.

“A quarter by a quarter,” Hausladen said. ​“That’s our slogan. Every quarter we’ll review the data and then if it needs it, we’ll increase it by 25 cents or decrease it by 25 cents.”

Hill Alder David Reyes, chairman of the Transportation Working Group, said that alders will get a look at a similar presentation from Hausladen on Monday after their bimonthly meeting. Once all the alders have some understanding about the proposed pilot and have a chance to present it to their constituents, he said, then there is a possibility that the project could move forward.

“I think doing this workshop and then possibly the pilot could create more awareness around the areas of opportunity where we can improve,” Reyes said.