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So the parking advisory panel, Molly had to jump off to cover another meeting that's supposedly more important. I just wanted to add a little to what's here. https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1351635155518189570
I wondered before the meeting if Chip Boyles, the incoming city manager, who was attending in his capacity as outgoing executive director of the TJ Planning District Commission, realized how many journalists would be on the call, some of us incognito.
In the event, there was a zoom hiccup and I missed almost all of his remarks, and then he left early. Oh well! But in general, our task at this meeting was to hear from several city staff members as we get ready to help formulate the city's next long-term parking plan.
The plan ... the current one is a one-page document, pretty sparse really, and for whatever reason tends to focus pretty heavily on increasing parking supply. And, for better or worse, city government has accomplished most of the goals it laid out.
I ... think it's online somewhere. I'm not sure. Honestly you're not missing much if you haven't seen it at this point, but one notable thing is that it explicitly calls for increasing the supply of parking downtown.
That part kind of sneaked in there, and was not one of the recommendations of the last formal parking study that the city paid outside consultants a lot of money for. I'd love to know how, but either way, hopefully it won't happen again.
Found it. Here (pdf) is the now largely expired Parking Action Plan. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjOmZ-ntqnuAhVM0FkKHRhFCb8QFjABegQIAhAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcharlottesville.gov%2FDocumentCenter%2FView%2F338%2FParking-Study-2015-PDF&usg=AOvVaw1FQVrWHI3sLN9k3kpCh2bY (does this work? lol)
I hate to belabor this but the Nelson Nygaard parking study said the city should "maintain and monitor" parking supply, and somehow that turned into "maintain and grow" supply in the Parking Action Plan. 
But the good news is we're working on a new plan, and my hope is that we'll consider parking downtown less in a vacuum and more as part of the broader issue of how people get around the city and the region, and will in the future.
Just to editorialize, I think there's a feeling among some influential people that "equity" implies a certain car-friendliness, because low-income people (among others) need to be able to drive to their jobs. I think this is a little wrongheaded.
Cars are expensive to own and maintain, and if the other options were better and more accessible, I think a lot of people would be much better served by those other options! I actually think this is very much something the parking advisory panel should think about.
And fortunately, one of our guests today was Garland Williams, director of Charlottesville Area Transit, who seemed to agree.
Williams talked about expanding park-and-ride options, and also about adding bus routes. "If the network is designed correctly, which we're working on," that could alleviate the demand for parking, he said. But here is the key:
Williams said it's critical to make sure that transit is adequately funded. Me editorializing again ... that means not thinking of the bus system as a business that has to make a profit to justify its existence, but seeing it as the public good that it is.
"If you're trying to get people to use transit and they've got to wait [for] once an hour, no one's going to use it," he said. So CAT needs more money, and that, just as much as expanding supply, is a way to make sure there's parking available for people who need it.
Williams also talked about a long-term goal of making the bus system free, which would also increase usage, but he said that's likely a few years out.
In these meetings we keep coming back to the fact that nobody really knows how much demand for parking will return once the pandemic ends. I think it's reasonable to expect it won't all come back anytime soon, since a lot of us will have more flexible work from home options.
Chip Boyles mentioned that VDOT has data, through a contractor called Streetlight, that uses cell phone signals to trace how many people move in and out of given areas and in what configurations. This would go a long way toward telling us at least about the current situation.
BUT, he said, "we don't have the staffing or expertise" at present to be able to use it. My fellow panelist @dannyyoder, who has actually used this data in a prior job, said it's not actually that hard to use, but does take time, which city staff may not have.
But, jeez, just imo it seems like something worth figuring out if we're going around spending tens of millions of dollars on new garages.
Couple of other scattered points. Rick Siebert, the city's parking director, talked about how in other localities, revenue from parking is sometimes directed towards funding transit, like buses. Seems like a cool idea. BUT ...
"You have to have money to transfer," Rick said. "That's why some places have on-street paid parking." (Charlottesville tried this a couple of years ago, for like a month, and quickly abandoned its pilot program because downtown business owners didn't like it.)
The meter program is clearly still a sore point. Fellow panelist Kirby Hutto, GM of the Spring Pavilion, said "Yeah, but I think that's not going to happen, unfortunately," when Rick brought it up today. Rick replied, "It's a five-year plan" that we're working on.
Speaking of Kirby he also was emphatic that he believes there needs to be enough parking available downtown to accommodate peak-demand events, like concerts. So like thousands of extra people. This comes up with some frequency in these meetings, honestly.
In response, later, Garland Williams said CAT could actually one day help deal with special high-demand events if it has advance notice and gets permission to add buses from the council or the state or whoever.
Rick also noted that city city's peak demand hours, historically, have been "very narrow," typically from noon to 2 p.m., monday through Friday. "We've never had a parking problem at 8 p.m.," he said.
He also said, "I't svery seldom that an event is large enough at the Pavilion, at the Paramount, where we didn't have plenty of parking in the evening."
I think I need to sign off for now ... there are still some random points from the meeting I wanted to get on the record, and I can come back to them later.
But honestly, I found this meeting really encouraging, because it suggested to me that a lot of city staffers are interested in looking at transportation issues broadly, in a way that isn't just focused on counting parking spaces. To be continued ...
