Thomas Breen File Photo
Doug Hausladen.
“A Quarter A Quarter”— that’s how often rates may change in town if the city embarks on a planned pilot program to change how we pay to park at the meter.
City transit chief Doug Hausladen unveiled that slogan Thursday night as he brought city alders up to speed on the planned pilot of an approach called “Performance-Based Pricing” and “Dynamic Pricing.” The three-year pilot could begin this coming January.
Under the plan, it will no longer cost $1.50 an hour to park at any meter in town. Instead, the city will tweak the prices — 25 cents at a time, every three months — at each meter based on how often people have been parking there. The goal is to free up a couple spaces in h high-demand spots downtown, get more people parking overall, and fill in spaces on the periphery of the city’s central core.
City of New Haven
It might end up costing you 75 cents an hour to park near the Green in the morning, but then $2.50 in the afternoon when demand is great, for instance. If you don’t mind parking on Prospect Street, you could pay only 50 cents in the morning, 75 cents at night.
An it might bring the city up to $122,000 in new meter-generated revenue a year, while cutting down on pollution and drawing more visitors to town, Hausladen estimated.
Hausladen offered the update at a City Hall meeting of the Board of Alders City Services and Environmental Policy committee of the Board of Alders City Services and Environmental Policy Committee. The committee doesn’t decide on whether to launch the pilot; that’s up to the Board of Police Commissioners, which hears about it at its next meeting. Members of the alder committee generally gave a favorable reaction to Hausladen’s plan, while pumping him with questions about the frequency of tweaks and color-coded new signage he’s planning to role out to inform people about the price differentials in different zones.
Click here to view the full PowerPoint update. (Click here and here for previous stories about Hausladen’s evolving plan.)
The proposed pilot is one of the outcomes of the Parking and Transit Working Group, which has been meeting for more than a year.
With the downtown and near-to-downtown divided into four zones — Core 1, Core 2, Premium, and Value — the metering can be adjusted 25 cents every four months based on demand at different times of the day. Hence the new slogan “A quarter every quarter.”
The goal is85 percent utilization across the whole of the 3,000 metered street parking spots, 1,000 of those spots being downtown.
We’d like, for example, Hausladen said, to have fewer people parking on Chapel between Temple and York, which would leave some spots for visitors, and more people, for example, choosing to go up to Hillhouse, where you’d exchange, presumably, cheaper parking for a little bit of a walk to your destination.
The pricing and promotion would seek to accomplish specific goals and targets like that throughout the center city.
“Our real goal,” said Hausladen, “is to have one or two spaces always available on a block,”
City of New Haven
East Rock Alder Anna Festa and Prospect Hill/Newhallville/Dixwell Alder Steve Winter queried Hausladen on research into the effectiveness such a plan in other cities. Hausladen reported that generally it has been successful. Seattle, Hausladen said, adjusted its pricing, based on usage, about ten times over a three-year period.
“So Seattle is still tweaking it?” Festa pressed Hausladen.
“Yes,” he said, but while those changes garnered a lot of attention in the beginning when people got used to the new program, the current tweaks don’t make news, he said.
“Our goal is not to make news” either, he said, which is why the price changes will be introduced slowly, a quarter at a time, and reviewed in public sessions, every quarter of the year.
Festa also pressed Hausladen about signage, which Hausladen said is still a work in progress. “We’re looking to create a simple style. The big goal is to be clear. Now our visual language is confusing.”
Downtown Alder Abby Roth asked if the meters, likely to be painted in the colors of the four pricing zones, would be legible to the color-blind. Hausladen said the paint to be used would meet that standard.
Roth also asked about the effect of the project on ticket revenue for the city. Hausladen’s answer: “We anticipate ticket revenue to remain roughly the same.”
Winter asked if the city’s technology would enable Hauslden to change rates even more frequently. Hausladen reiterated that a quarter per quarter was just right. Instituting changes more dramatic might be like pulling the Bandaid off in one painful rip, he said.
Hausladen emphasized that the congestion or performance-based parking is only one aspect of the working group’s overall look at transportation in New Haven. For example, maintenance and quality of street lighting have come under the responsibility of his department. “This is wholistic,” he said, meaning that another way to look at the parking changes of which the pilot is harbinger is “to make it more inviting to walk that extra block or two” from high-demand spots into the core part of Downtown.
Chair Sal DeCola of Morris Cove said that his committee is making no recommendation or even communication to the Board of Traffic Commissioners. The aim of Thursday’s workshop, he said: “We’re aware if we get complaints, so we can tweak it.”
Westville Alder Adam Marchand, also a member of the Parking and Transit Working Group, said he is keenly interested in how the pilot goes, “so we have the parking for businesses” along with the other goals of the pilot.
He conceded that as change is challenging, the project will be testing “the tolerance of our residents” to learn a new system.
Festa was positive in her assessment but reiterated, “I’m afraid of the [possible] confusion” that might, at least initially, emerge from the color coding of meters in the different zones.
If the project is approved by the city’s Board of Traffic Commissioners when it’s submitted next month, the first round of new rates well might be inaugurated in January 2019 and the pilot program run for three years.
In the interim before launch, during the fall months, Hausladen plans to take the new program to the community management teams as part of the roll out and education about the new system.
He said the cost to implement the pilot is mainly his staff’s time, and that funding for the signage is coming from capital savings that have accrued from other projects.
