For weeks, the green “No Meters” signs posted on Grand Avenue storefronts told St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and other city officials how most business owners and neighbors view a plan to install parking meters along one of the Twin Cities’ best known shopping avenues.It rarely is pretty. A businessman on the street understood what's going on:
On Monday night, a raucous crowd of several hundred people took the opportunity to tell him in person.
It wasn’t pretty.
“What we need is honest politicians,” Mike Schumann, owner of Traditions on Grand, a home furnishings store, said to loud cheers from the crowd. “This is not about parking, this is about raising revenue.”Of course it is. As the Star Tribune's James Walsh explains, the meters are the camel's nose:
The Grand Avenue plan would serve as a pilot program for potentially adding meters elsewhere in St. Paul. The city already has increased hours and raised parking rates at meters around Xcel Energy Center and CHS Field in Lowertown.If you can put meters on Grand Avenue, you can put them on a number of other commercial corridors in St. Paul -- Snelling Avenue, Payne Avenue, Larpenteur Avenue, Cleveland Avenue -- and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Just a guess -- parking will remain free in Roseville, Eagan and Maplewood.
13 comments:
Free public parking in a market that would support a price above zero (which I imagine you have in St. Paul's shopping districts, and not the 'burbs) is a subsidy to car owners (and to an extent, the businesses on that street.) Why not align the price with demand and let the chief beneficiaries defray the cost?
Why not align the price with demand and let the chief beneficiaries defray the cost?
Because Grand Avenue is a commercial district in an otherwise residential area. I can already promise you what will happen -- people will avoid the meters and park on the side streets in the neighborhood. It already happens if you can't find a spot on Grand. And, at the margins, people who might come down to Grand will avoid it.
In other words, the market may support a price above zero, but the size of the market is likely to become smaller. The businesses on Grand understand that, which is why they are fighting this proposal. The problem for them? There's no effective opposition to the DFL in St. Paul, so they have to hope the local politicians will be nice to them.
Because Grand Avenue is a commercial district in an otherwise residential area.
In other words, it's an urban neighborhood.
I'm always amazed how quickly conservatives become socialists when it comes to parking.
The market may support a price above zero, but the business owners understand that just because you can impose a higher price doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. They don't call it "nickel and dime you to death" for nothing.
Plus, I've got the notion that the business owners might also point out that they've been paying for those parking spaces through their property taxes for decades. Yes, it's socialism, but it's socialism that was imposed on them decades ago, and it's something that their customers have gotten used to.
... business owners might also point out that they've been paying for those parking spaces through their property taxes for decades.
...And so has every other property tax payer in the city/county. That's what "public" property means. You aren't entitled to the public right of way adjacent to your property any more than anyone else.
OF COURSE business owners want free public parking next to their business. Parking is a terribly inefficient use of valuable land, especially if it is only of any value to you 8-10 hours a day. Much better to let the taxpayers pay for it!
If a municipality can make more off of street parking than it costs to enforce restrictions, they should. Otherwise, they are just passing on the marginal costs of maintenance to the taxpayer. And if it is metered, it can have the added benefit of incentivizing turnover, which can be good for business.
I'm always amazed how quickly conservatives become socialists when it comes to parking.
Parking wants to be free, dude. And what Bubba said about property taxes for the businesses along the street. This isn't about market. It's about a city with politicians who with an insatiable desire for taxes and no effective opposition. The argument in this case is largely from the people in the neighborhood, who are, in the main, dedicated liberals. They live in big, stately homes on the streets that run parallel to Grand.
People go down to Grand Avenue because they have some unusual shops and good bars and restaurants. It is also the home of some of the upscale chain stores (e.g., Restoration Hardware) that you can find out in the 'burbs, too, but there are also neighborhood grocery stores, dry cleaners and other similar establishments on the street. The businesses there are competing not only with the suburbs, but also with similar areas in Minneapolis. Might they survive parking meters? Sure. Will it hurt their businesses? Yes, at least at the margins, and maybe more than that. Will they derive any benefit from the meters? No.
I don't have a dog in this fight, really. I hang out in my antiseptic suburban milieu. I don't go out drinking any more and we have plenty of choices for dining and entertainment, so I'm down to Grand Avenue maybe 1-2 times a year, if that.
the parking meters will go in, and the 'no parking signs' will soon go up in the surrounding residential streets. that how we do it in CA.
I think it's one thing to have more paid parking in downtown St. Paul, where a parking spot provides you immediate access to hundreds of various shops, businesses and restaurants in a very condensed area. But Grand is a thin island of businesses surrounded by residential housing.
I loath going to a Grand-based business already because of many issues D pointed out. Very few of the businesses there have parking lots, and those that do have only a handful of spots. The spill-over to residential side streets has been happening for decades - this will only accelerate the process.
If the city wanted to get revenue and aid local businesses, they'd look at expanding paid parking ramps along Grand (which right now has only 1 that I can think of). Hell, we have 3 parking ramps at 50th & France in Edina, and a fourth going in soon. That's for the city equivalent of about 2 blocks. Now, building new ramps probably isn't terribly practical just given the available space, but at least they'd be adding to parking availability, instead of wringing blood from the few parking stones left.
The parking spaces are public, yes, but in most cities, the tacit agreement has been that either the store will provide parking (which is taxed heavily), or the store will be taxed heavily to pay for the parking spaces. So in effect, they're being asked to pay twice for the same thing.
So they're public, but they're not. Business owners can point that out in their property tax assessments.
In my view, as inefficient as parking spaces seem, they're a much better option than transit because the latter typically takes 1.5-2 hours to go 20 miles or less if you've got even one transfer--and you still get to typically walk a mile to your destination.
So if your city makes driving a pain, you will quickly find that your downtown business district--and the property and sales tax revenue it can generate--will die.
(side note; at 25 passenger miles per gallon of diesel--equivalent to about 18 pmpg of gasoline--the city bus is about as efficient as a Suburban with one person in it....it's not the environmentally sound choice)
One other comment is that, at about $800 apiece to install a meter and $100/year to maintain it (Santa Barbara figures), it takes a lot of revenue/very consistent usage to get much revenue out of parking meters. Kinda like the income tax--the revenue/cost & pain in the tuckus ratio isn't that good.
The real reason to use parking meters is when you've got a lot of people coming for something else (work, medical care, sporting events), and you don't want workers/patients/fans camping there forever. Since you don't have that circumstance on Grand, it simply doesn't make sense.
If the city fathers/mothers had their way, St. Paul would be a cold Cuba. The private sector - from mom and pop businesses to Ford Motor Co. (oh wait, they're gone) - is barely tolerated. Its only function is to lay golden eggs while being slowly strangled.
Earlier this year businesses on Cleveland Ave. in St. Paul were steamrolled by the city, losing the street parking in front of their establishments in favor of the Holy Bike Lanes. The City looked thoughtful in the face of complaints by the owners - and then went ahead and did what it wanted, secure in its long winning streak of not being held accountable for anything and that people would soon forget.
Well, apparently people noticed and didn't forget. After seeing what happened to the Cleveland Ave. businesses they realized that a polite, "Hey, now..." wasn't going to accomplish anything. In the last two weeks both the Minneapolis and St.Paul city councils have been met at the gates with organized and loud resistance as they tried to cram down more governmental overreach in the name of sacraments even more dear than bike lanes: unionization by fiat in Minneapolis and parking meter revenue in St. Paul. The mayors and councils of these cities were stunned by the resistance and beat strategic retreats. They won't go away, of course, but they realize that the dynamics have changed, even in one-party cities.
To be fair, what Pig's Eye has is a lot of neighborhoods designed for one car per household at most and a number of children in each home, but what it has now is generally at least two vehicles per household and one or two children in a home, max. Plus, the lifetime jobs/careers that our grandparents enjoyed are largely a thing of the past, and the little groceries and such that used to populate the avenue have been gone since I was a child, replaced by trendy shops and restaurants. So the demographics that made commercial districts like Grand Ave thrive back in the day are simply not there anymore, and hence you've got to make some tough choices.
My take, like that of First Ringer, is that the area simply needs parking where drivers do not need to be afraid of their car being towed if they spend a couple of hours over a meal, looking for fabric at Treadle, and the like. Parking meters are the exact wrong solution there. Parking lots and ramps are.
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