As it is now, any resident of Ward 2 can get a Zone 2 residential parking permit (an “RPP”). This enables a driver to park for an unlimited amount of time in spaces that would otherwise require you to move your car after two hours. This includes just about every on-street parking space in Georgetown except on the commercial strips.

The vast majority of the parking spaces are probably occupied by Georgetown residents. But there is nothing preventing any Ward 2 resident from parking his or her car in Georgetown all day. And if spots are set aside as resident-only under a new parking scheme, with the permits as they are, it would mean residents of Dupont, Foggy Bottom and downtown would be able to still use those spots.

So what about making a new RPP just for Georgetown? This would undoubtedly make it easier for Georgetown residents to find parking, but it would have some draw backs. Most obviously, if there were a new RPP carved out for Georgetown, it would likely mean that Georgetowners would be unable to park unlimitedly in the rest of Ward 2. GM knows of at least a couple people who drive to work in Dupont or downtown and park in Zone 2 spaces all day. But is their desire to park for free downtown worth more than making it easier for residents to park closer to their homes?

There are examples of smaller residential parking zones like this. For example, the city of Boston has a neighborhood parking permit program similar to DC’s except that instead of 8 large zones, the city is broken up into 21 different neighborhood zones (for reference, DC is actually a bit larger in landmass than the city of Boston). More nearby, Arlington also has much smaller residential parking zones than DC’s.

In the end, whether this would make sense depends on data that we simply don’t have. Namely, on an average day how many cars parked in Georgetown with a Zone 2 sticker are from outside the neighborhood? If it’s very low, then this is probably a change not worth making. But it could be high, or more likely, it could be high along specific blocks. And moreover, if Georgetown does adopt a program of setting aside blocks for resident-only parking, the need to limit who qualifies as a resident may increase, particularly on blocks near the commercial areas.

None of this argument is Georgetown-specific, by the way. If it makes sense here, it probably makes sense in other neighborhoods like Cleveland Park or Capitol Hill. So none of this is about saying Georgetown is special or should be treated differently. It really comes down to this: If the purpose of residential parking stickers is to make it easier for residents to find parking, shouldn’t the residential zones reflect neighborhood boundaries, not ward boundaries?

Councilmember Jack Evans’ proposal to roll back parking meter rates and hours of enforcement in commercial corridors is based, according to Evans, on the complaints and requests of businesses and residents in his ward. However, a survey of organizations representing residents and businesses in Georgetown fails to find anyone asking Evans for his proposal.

His proposal passed out of his committee by a 3-2 vote and Evans frequently points to these complaints in defending the $5.2 million measure.

Evans told the Washington Examiner, “I get consistent complaints about the parking meters everywhere I go in my ward from residents. I can’t go into a restaurant without the owner coming out to complain about the cost of the parking meters.”

Recently several DC pols have issued some proposals that could significantly impact Georgetown’s transportation mix. Some of the ideas are good, others bad.

Let’s start with the good.

Up until Chris Ziemann left DDOT last year, Ward 2 had a dedicated DDOT planner. This position can coordinate transportation projects across the ward. Further it can lobby DDOT on the ward’s behalf and bring a unified vision across multiple projects and neighborhoods. Unfortunately since Chris left, the position has remained empty and Mayor Gray recommended it simply be cut completely. Councilmember Tommy Wells, however, proposed that this position–as well as the vacant ward planner positions for Wards 3 and 5–be filled again. This is a good proposal.

Additionally, Wells proposed creating a position titled Parking Czar. This individual would spend all his or her time addressing the parking issue. In particular, this person would bring life back to the stalled effort to bring performance parking to DC. This is something that GM has lobbied to bring to Georgetown for a while. In short: right now we price street parking too low and as a result visitors troll the neighborhood looking for free parking rather than simply driving to the pay garages. This increases traffic, encourages people to leave their car parked for as long as possible and makes it more difficult for residents to find a parking spot near their homes. By raising the price of parking enough that there is always at least 10-15% of the street spaces open, we can encourage more turnover. Plus, the additional parking fees will get plowed back into the neighborhood in the form of streetscape improvements, and the like.

Having a parking czar will make it much more likely that such a policy can come to Georgetown.

Finally, speaking of parking, Wells proposed raising the cost of obtaining multiple residential parking permits per household. This is also a policy GM has lobbied for before. Under Wells’ proposal, the first RPP would cost $35 (up from the paltry $15 now). A second RPP would cost $50, and a third would cost $100. (right now it’s just $15 per car no matter how many are registered to the same address). If one house is hogging up all the street parking on a block, at least they’ll pay more to do so, and overtime it would discourage such multicar households.

Also, Wells proposed keeping the Circulator rate at $1.

But here’s the bad.

Our councilmember and neighbor, Jack Evans, has proposed to slash the meter fees in Georgetown (and downtown) from $2.00/hr to $1.00/hr and to make parking free after 6:30 pm. Why is this bad? Because if you have a shortage of a good (in this case, open parking spots) the last thing you want to do is make that good even cheaper. It is the complete opposite of performance parking and it is totally illogical. Evans told the Examiner “I know the anti-car people will say, ‘[higher meter fees are] working, it’s working,’ But I get too many complaints [from restaurant owners] for it to be working.”

Evans will soon learn that peoples’ ability to complain about parking is bottomless. If it’s not the price they’ll complain about, it’s the availability. That’s why we need someone to be a parking czar to look at the problem scientifically and decide the best way to allocate street parking in a way that benefits the most, not the loudest.

It’s important to note that it very well may be that meter fees are too high in some places and/or at some times, including some places in Georgetown. The test is how full the spaces get. If they are too full, for too long, they’re too cheap. But if they’re too empty, for too long, then they’re too expensive (or there’s too much of it at that location). GM doesn’t think the parking fee should be higher in all places at all times, just where and when the demand is too high. But Evans’ proposal leaves no room for flexibility.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Metrocurean rates Dolcezza as a top Hot Chocolate purveyor. GM concurs; their hot chocolate is like a melted chocolate bar; it’s that thick.
• Where the bus route names, including the G2, came from.
• In researching for an article that will appear later today, GM came across this cool website that compiles information from pay garages. It’s not real time information, but it gives you daily and monthly rates, which is pretty helpful.

So doubling it does seem like a quick and easy way to raise revenues while spreading the pain pretty thin. But it would be a failed opportunity. Before we consider raising the fee for households with one car, we ought to raise it for houses with two cars, and raising it even more for houses with three or more cars.

See how this would play out in a parking-challenged neighborhood like Georgetown: According to the 2000 Census, there are roughly 4,936 cars in Georgetown. There are only 4,640 households in Georgetown. Of those households here’s how the car ownership breaks down:

• 20% of households have no car
• 57% of households have one car
• 23% of households have more than one car

You might think, well only 23% of households have multiple cars, so they can’t be causing much of the parking shortage. But that’s wrong. almost half (46%) of cars in Georgetown are owned by households that own more than one car. If every household with more than one car got rid of just one car (keep in mind some households have five cars) there would be 1,200 fewer cars in Georgetown, a drop of 21%. If even just half the multi-car households got rid of just one car, there’d be 528 fewer cars in Georgetown, an 11% drop.

To flip it around: how many more cars would be in Georgetown if every no-car or one-car household followed the model of multi-car households? 7,164, an increase of 46%. There is simply not enough parking to accommodate that, and, besides, our streets would be completed gridlocked.

Essentially, all of these multi-car households are taking more than their “fair share” of street-space and can do so simply because the majority of people don’t do so. Moreover, they only pay an extra $15 per car to do it (yes, registration cost $72 a year, but everyone pays that regardless of whether they’re entitled to a Residential Parking Permit or not). That’s not right.

And so before we raise everyone’s permit costs, we should focus on the multi-car households first. For discussion purposes, lets consider this structure: $15 for the first car, $30 for the second, $45 for the third, and so on. How does this add up?

If we simply doubled the rate for everyone we’d generate roughly $148,000 in fees from Georgetown car owners. If we went with GM’s proposal, we’d generate $197,000 in fees. If in adopting these higher fees we caused every multi-car household to give up one car, we’d still generate $163,000 in fees from Georgetown.

So by adopting this fee structure, we’d raise more money for the city and possibly lower the number of cars on the street, thus decreasing traffic and improving parking availability. And moreover it would simply be a more fair way of allocating a scarce public resource.

Yes, some may argue that this is unfair to households that simply have to have more than one car. GM will admit that such households probably do exist. But GM doubts it’s the majority of multi-car households. Many have more than one car simply because it’s so cheap to keep two cars. Moreover, we’re still only talking about a fee of one tank of gas a year. If there is one major flaw in this proposal, it’s that it doesn’t raise the fees high enough to actually affect behavior. But for now, at least, it would point us in the right direction and, of course, help close the budget gap too.

On Tuesday, Vincent Gray soundly beat Adrian Fenty for the Democratic nomination for mayor. Given the one-party state that we live in, Gray can for all intents and purposes be considered the mayor-elect. So what will his mayoralty mean for Georgetown? It’s not clear, since he has not said too much specifically about Georgetown, but that doesn’t mean GM can’t do a little speculation on a few issues!

Hardy School

GM has kicked around the idea of writing an article about Michelle Rhee’s disastrous meeting with the Hardy PTA last December and call it “The Night Adrian Fenty Lost the Election.” Yes there were other single events that seemed to encapsulate everything that Fenty was doing wrong to get reelected, but the Hardy incident stands out as a particularly bad one. Not for nothing, but the meeting ended with Ward 7 councilmember Yvette Alexander delivering a rousing speech to the angry crowd that to get rid of Rhee they’d have to get rid of Fenty first. Step one can be checked off.

While the post-Pope transition appears to be going along with relatively minimal problems, it seems likely that an appetite remains within the Hardy PTA to roll back the changes and reinstall Patrick Pope as principal. Moreover, there may be an effort to finally convert Hardy entirely into a magnet arts school. Given that the Hardy situation became a bit of a rallying cry for pro-Gray voters, it seems likely that at least some change of course is taken.

Of course much of that depends on whether Michelle Rhee sticks around and how much latitude Gray gives her. The jury is still out on that.

Parking

The primary complaint of residents and visitors of Georgetown is parking. Rather than face the reality that it’s a scarce resource and to treat it as such, many people take the contradictory position that parking can somehow be easy and cheap if only the government would do X or Y.

So with that in mind, during the last mayoral debate Carol Joynt lobbed a parking question at the candidates:

(If the embed isn’t working, watch it here: http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post.cgi?id=7130)

Fringe candidate Leo Alexander gave the populist and dead-end answer that parking needs to be cheaper and enforcement lighter. Fenty gave the performance parking answer (kind of), which GM loved. And Vince Gray didn’t really address parking head-on, but gave a strong endorsement to mass transit.

What does this mean? Well, as hashed out over at GGW, Gray has given some mixed messages on performance parking. He seems to intellectually “get it” but he nonetheless made some comments about the cost of parking being too high.

And while Gray didn’t get as wonky about parking theories as Fenty, his emphasis on mass transit is nonetheless apt. And it gets at the problem in Carol’s question: Georgetown doesn’t have a parking problem, it has a driving problem. We can’t make more parking spots, but we can reduce the number of cars and the number of car trips.

Furthermore, some leaders in Georgetown have been quietly planning a radical overhaul of parking for Georgetown. Built on the principal that parking on the street should be expensive enough that some spots are always free, these changes could improve the parking experience in Georgetown significantly.

It’s still a long-shot, and organizing Georgetown behind the idea is probably more of a challenge than getting DDOT on board, so Gray’s views may not be that relevant. But that said, we do need to be on the lookout for Gray’s populist streak and make sure he doesn’t thwart reform in Georgetown to appease a misguided belief that parking can be easy and cheap at the same time.

Business Environment

Frankly it’s not like Fenty did much for Georgetown businesses and all signs point to that city-neglect continuing. The Georgetown commercial district will continue to trudge along without clear leadership or vision. The BID and GBA will do what they can, but there’s only so much. And the ANC will look out for the interests that the ANC looks out for. But a deafening silence from the Wilson Building on what to do about the Georgetown commercial district will keep rolling on.

We’ve all seen them. Some of us have put them up ourselves. They’re Emergency No Parking signs, and they’re a fact of life in neighborhoods like Georgetown. They ordinarily evoke a bit of frustration, and sometimes a whole lot, but we learn to live with them.

Those that have had to put them up themselves have had two options:

• Submit an application to DDOT, pay $34, and travel all the way down to North Capitol St. to pick up the signs once the application is approved;
• Go to MPD 2D headquarters on Idaho Ave. and pick up the signs for free

Unsurprisingly, most people choose Option Two. But Option Two is available no longer. MPD no longer issues No Parking Signs.

If you need to block off some parking spaces, you have only one choice now: submit and application to DDOT and pay $34. The upside? Maybe fewer people will use them.

Hat tip to GGW’s Lynda Laughlin.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Duke Ellington School not moving. For now.
• Parking frustrations on O St.
• Don’t forget the Haiti benefit above Lululemon tonight.

For instance, on Monday night a resident came applying for permission to construct a basement exit to her house. The conversation soon turned to how many square feet the butler’s pantry was in the basement. What does that have to do with a basement exit you ask? A basement with a kitchen and an exit could be turned into a completely separate basement apartment. And in the minds of Commissioners, and many residents, another apartment means another car and another car means one fewer parking spot.

This is how the great Georgetown bugaboo, cars and parking, guides many of the decisions of our elected officials.

But are they basing their decisions on a fair picture of the neighborhood or are they letting their own flawed perceptions and the voices of a loud minority guide them?

GM dug into the numbers and found that the true picture of cars in Georgetown is complicated. The problem is felt by fewer than you’d think and the bulk of the problem may come from the choices of surprisingly few. Find out why after the jump.

The Cars We Own (or Don’t):

According to the 2000 census, there are 4,640 households in Georgetown (containing a total of 8,524 people). Guess how many of those 4,640 households have absolutely no car: 934. That’s twenty percent.

That bears repeating. One out of every five households in Georgetown has no car. That probably comes as a surprise to the other four households, but obviously a good number of Georgetowners get by without the aid of a car. Moreover, a third of all rental households have no cars. So if you add that new English basement apartment, there’s a one in three chance that no new car will follow. That’s still above fifty percent, but it’s well below the certainty that some would have you believe.

Road Hogs

But the picture is more complicated than just houses with and houses without cars. Some households have more than one car.

In Georgetown that number is 23%. What does that mean? There are only a handful more households that have two or more cars than there are households with no cars.

And what effect do these multi-car households have on the overall population of cars? They represent 46% of all cars in Georgetown.

So nearly half the parking spaces in Georgetown are taken by fewer than a quarter of the households. (Yes, a minority of cars are parked off-street. But for every garage or alley there’s a curb cut taking away up to three useable spots).

What if these multi-car households learned to live with just one car? The number of cars in Georgetown would fall by 25%.

And if just half the multi-car households gave up just one car, there would be 529 fewer cars in Georgetown. If that were achieved, we could then theoretically add over 700 new rental units before we got back to the same number of cars we have now.

We may already be moving towards the first part. The number of cars registered in the District fell 5.8% from 2005 to 2008 (during a time when the District population grew 1.7%) and perhaps some of that 5.8% came from Georgetown. (We’ll have a better picture in 2010 or 2011 when we’ll finally get census tract records from the last five years.)

So What?

There are several issues that arise in the disconnect between the perception and the reality of cars in Georgetown. When the ANC or other entities put parking paramount to all other issues, they are disregarding the interests of one in five Georgetown residents. How does the focus on parking affect non-drivers? When we don’t let that basement get turned into a separate apartment because we’re worried about another car hitting the street we’re keeping another set of eyes off the street too. We’re also keeping a customer out of neighborhood stores like Scheele’s. Or a potential babysitter out of our rolodexes. Or just another neighbor to know. All because there’s a sixty-six percent chance they may bring a car.

Moreover, these numbers show that the parking problem has less to do with the number of households and more to do with a small minority that chooses to have more than one car. So instead of browbeating a resident about the square footage of her butler’s pantry, the ANC ought to be asking each applicant that comes before it “how many cars do you have and could you live with just one?”

We need to finally introduce some rationality to our discussions of cars and parking. We need to stop assuming that everyone drives and we need to realize that we’re not all in this together equally. Some are taking more than what is sustainable, yet they may also be the ones making the loudest complaints. This is a crucial point. If every household followed the lead of the multi-car households, there would be 80% more cars on the street. That would be a crippling amount of cars.

Next week GM will dig into how exactly Georgetowners get there from here, and how that also should affect our discussions of cars and parking.

That was the adjournment time of tonight’s ANC meeting. Assuming the meeting kicked off at 6:30 (GM was a few minutes late), the meeting was a mere hour and a half. That must be some sort of a record. Let’s go to the video tape:

Lap One: Good On Ya Denise

Recently retired CAG President Denise Cunningham was awarded a special commendation from the Commission tonight. Apparently this is the highest reward the ANC can give and as such requires a unanimous vote.

Thankfully the vote was unanimous. Good thing, seeing as they already printed up the special commendation.

Lap Two: Georgetown Billiards Space

Apparently Georgetown Billiards recently closed and the owners of the Eye Bar are planning to open something there. Given the fact that the Eye Bar is more of a club, the commissioners are nervous the replacement for Georgetown Billiards will also be a club. Commissioner Starrels promised that the ANC would force it into being a restaurant, and only a restaurant. However, it’s too early to predict how this will go since no one has made any applications other than to transfer the license over to the new owners.

All in all, it does appear Georgetown has lost forever it’s only air hockey table.

Lap Three: Tour de Trois

The French Embassy is going to request a change to the curb in front of its gates to enable cabs to drop off people without backing up Reservoir Road traffic. The commission approved the proposal. GM is a little concerned about the visual and pedestrian impact of taking out the median between the in and the out driveways, but the commissioners didn’t share his concern. Domage.

Lap Four: No Pit Stop on a Parking Pad

The owners of 3020 Cambridge were back again asking for approval of a parking pad off the alley behind their house. The neighbors are mostly opposed (a couple came out in support of the pad so long as their names weren’t read out loud). There are some equity concerns with this application. Several of the houses on that street have done just what the owners are proposing. Should the ANC be bound to approve all applications since others have parking pads? The commission seems to reject this line of reasoning. GM is inclined to agree. Bad decisions need not obligate more bad decisions just for consistency’s sake.

Besides there’s plenty of parking in the upper East Village.

Bell Lap: Odds and Ends

• A rep from Jack Evans office gave an update on the Jellef situation: money won’t be included in this year’s budget to purchase the Boys and Girls Club property, but it will likely be paid for from the capital budget. The facilities should remain open without any disruptions for the transfer.
• The ANC decided to hold off its resolution in support of gay marriage. The resolution was pushed by ex-commissioner Jenna Lowenstein and current commissioner Golds, but it was put on delay to better time it with the Council legislation. Golds estimates that it will be adopted sometime in the next couple meetings. Apparently it is part of a larger effort from a group called DC for Marriage to get resolutions from ANCs across the city to encourage the adoption of gay marriage legislation.
• That’s it. It really was a fast show.