ZUS founder and President Dan Zack authored Chapter 45 of Donald Shoup’s follow up to his seminal work, The High Cost of Free Parking. In Parking and the City, Shoup and several contributors assess the implementation of his groundbreaking concepts of performance-based pricing for on-street parking, parking benefit districts, and the elimination of on-site parking requirements. In his chapter, Dan shares lessons from his experiment with these ideas in Downtown Redwood City, CA in 2005 through 2009.
Excerpt:
Revitalizing a Downtown with Smart Parking Policies
By Dan Zack, AICP
One of the most dramatic downtown comeback stories is taking place in Redwood City, California. This dynamic district, once ridiculed as Deadwood City, has seen an amazing turnaround due to zoning reform, effective investments in public spaces, and smart parking strategies.
At the turn of the millennium, Redwood City’s downtown was charming, but it had struggled economically since the 1960s. In the late 1990s, the city and its redevelopment agency launched a concerted effort to turn its downtown around. Revitalization plans included a 4,200-seat cinema, a restored courthouse with a Courthouse Square Plaza, thousands of new apartments, hundreds of new hotel rooms, and hundreds of thousands of square feet of new office, retail, restaurant, and entertainment uses.
At the time these plans were being created, parking was already considered tight. So, where would all of these new people put their cars? As the downtown development coordinator, I was given the task of figuring it out…
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