Facing overwhelmingly negative feedback, city drafts refinements to residential permit parking program

Transportation and Public Works officials presented draft changes to the director’s rules governing the department’s Residential Permit Parking program to the Urban Transportation Commission on May 6, teasing a set of tweaks and formalizations rather than an overhaul of the current program

The new rules will address how the department evaluates applications for participation in the program and how the program actually works in places where it’s already been implemented. This includes how distribution and revocations of permits are handled and alternatives to a rigid residents-only version of the program that critics have said is unfair to renters, commuters and visitors on the block.

Meanwhile, new applications for the program has been on pause since March 25 to accommodate the process of updating it. Joseph al-Hajeri, who oversees it as the department’s Parking Enterprise Manager and gave the presentation, noted recent results from a survey on the program which were “negative to critical,” and that “several responses contained emotionally charged or profane language, demonstrating [the] level of discontent.”

In a March 21 memo announcing the pause, the department provided a timeline that would have the new rules adopted sometime around July 10. However, due to the volume of feedback already received, interim assistant director Lewis Leff said the department would be pushing the whole process back by a week.

“We want to make sure we had a chance to digest all of that,” Leff said.

Issues apparently highlighted by respondents included “perceived unfairness, poor implementation, and a lack of enforcement of existing rules.” The overall sentiment, he highlighted, was 60-70 percent negative.

The new director’s rules would be the first significant update to the program since 2011, and the first time in its history that the program will operate formally under those rules rather than under “general guidelines,” a looser kind of regulatory existence typical of new programs undertaken by city departments.

The Residential Permit Parking program, though, is not especially new. It was begun in 1997 to handle an overflow of parking by UT Austin students into the neighborhoods around the downtown campus, but has expanded across the city since then.

According to the city website on the program, its purpose is “to ease the impacts of non-resident parking in neighborhoods along streets where space is limited and may be adjacent to commercial properties.” The new rules aim to support that program by making it clearer who is a “resident” for purposes of the program, and what constitutes “impacts.”

For example, to apply for and receive a permit, a resident would need to provide both proof of residence and insurance paperwork matching that address, rather than just the former and registration. For a block to be eligible for the program, a two-week study of parking on the block would need to find 50 percent of occupied parking spaces to be filled by non-residents on average on two random days each week.

They would also require those parking studies to be conducted on an occasional basis for blocks participating in the program to confirm continued eligibility, with a reevaluation automatically triggered if less than 66 percent of eligible residents on the block hold permits.

Urban Transportation Commission chair Susan Somers asked Leff and al-Hajeri if the program so far “pays for itself” through fees.

“The simple answer is, ‘No, it does not’,” al-Hajeri said. “Over time, as you know, we tried to streamline the program and make it more accessible. That’s costly, right?”

He picked out administrative tasks and enforcement across the city and across a wide range of time brackets – 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. versus 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., for example – as factors that create costs.

Hybrid permit/metered parking, like what exists on the streets around the main commercial drag of South Congress Avenue, could be one way to address those costs, al-Hajeri continued. He said the department was also looking into ways to factor the cost of enforcement into the fee schedule for the permits.

The commission declined to make a recommendation on the rules during the meeting, but Somers said they would likely consider one during their next meeting on June 6.

Photo by Tim1965 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link.

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