When the city of Durango asks itself and its residents how to address the perceived downtown parking problem, it should be transparent about what the question actually is. The adopted and proposed policies that have arisen over the past five years hint that the question is not how to provide more parking downtown, but instead, how to garner more revenue from the limited space available. It is not unusual behavior for a municipality; indeed, it follows the Churchillian dictum of never letting a good crisis go to waste. With competing demands on downtown’s limited parking resources combined with the city’s obligation to balance revenue collected against service provided, new parking policies should lean toward inclusion, not restriction.
The city is considering transitioning Narrow Gauge Avenue, a treasure trove of 10-hour meters tucked conveniently behind west side Main Avenue businesses, to a permitted system wherein metered parking would vanish. The idea behind the plan is to discourage downtown employees from parking along Main Avenue, taking up precious meter space from would-be customers. To wean employees and other takers from Main, the city would offer $75 monthly permits for permission to use the spaces on Narrow Gauge. The plan is being presented as a savings for downtown parkers – presumably employees – who, according to city calculations spend upwards of $100 a month for prime parking but are not interested in walking from the Transit Center lot, where $30 a month buys unlimited access.
There are some impressive leaps of logic involved here: that all downtown employees occupy Main Avenue spots nine hours daily, five days a week; that no one else relies on or enjoys the Narrow Gauge spaces for business access as customers; and, even more fundamentally, that there is a definable parking crisis in downtown Durango.
With each of these questions largely open, the city’s proposal to make a wholesale shift to a permitted parking system for Narrow Gauge Avenue – to the tune of $75 a month per parker – appears largely geared toward collecting parking dollars, both from permit purchasers and desperate scofflaws who would be ticketed for using the formerly metered spots on Narrow Gauge. This approach does not seem intended to provide more parking options, but rather to ensure more parking revenue.
Instead of jumping right to a permit-only system – even as a pilot – why not try the middle-ground approach of selling permits to those interested and allowing metered parking on Narrow Gauge for those whose downtown habits do not justify a $75 monthly outlay? Doing so would go much farther in providing a parking answer for the wide range of downtown frequenters – shoppers, diners, employees and all – who are hardly the monolith the city presents. Different users head downtown for different reasons and lengths of time on different days.
While it might be tempting to trade all meters for permits in order to gauge interest – and collect the ticket money that would flow from those not up to speed on the change – this seems a rather transparent attempt to boost parking revenue under the guise of a “pilot” program. The city should begin with the hybrid approach – offer both meters and permits to assess interest and make changes from there. At the very least, the effort will allow the city to gather critical data about the downtown parking crisis.
