For the first time in decades, downtown Tacoma visitors next year might have to pay for street parking. It’s a plan that advocates say might make more parking available for customers of downtown merchants and businesses alike.

The recommendation – not yet fully drafted, but destined to be completed and presented to the city in the next few weeks – comes from a 50-member downtown panel appointed by City Manager Eric Anderson. The committee has studied downtown parking since early this year.

The preliminary recommendation, said committee chairman Marty Campbell, is likely to call for installation of the 21st-century version of the parking meter – electronic kiosks that spit out parking receipts that are attached to the inside of curbside windows for parking checkers to see. The system would be similar to one used in much of downtown Seattle and Portland.

The parking recommendations are the first baby steps in what could become a much larger and more ambitious plan to radically change the pattern of downtown commuting from one dominated by single-occupancy vehicle trips – 76 percent now – to one that relies more on transit, car pools, walking and biking to bring downtown workers to their offices.

NEGOTIATING GROWTH

That goal is driven by the desire to reduce pollution and traffic congestion, but on a more practical level by the need to save money. Parking structures are expensive to build – an estimated $35,000 to $45,000 per stall in a multistory garage – and costly to operate.

And as downtown’s employment level grows, so will the demand grow on the road network to accommodate all the commuters’ cars.

“It’s all about making smart choices,” said Rick Williams, a Portland-based parking consultant who’s on the short list for the city to hire to help map out the new parking strategy. Williams recently spoke to downtown business leaders at a Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber forum on parking. Downtown developers and businesses can choose to pay the price for building garages, or they can adopt policies designed to give downtown employees both positive incentives to use alternate means of transportation to work and negative ones if they don’t, Williams said.

In 2005, downtown Tacoma was the workplace for nearly 34,000 people. If downtown employment grows by a modest 1.4 percent per year, 47,189 people will work downtown in 2025, city figures show. If 76 percent continue to drive to work alone and 12 percent share a ride, then downtown will need 10,866 new parking spots by 2025. That’s 14 new 800-stall garages or 95 acres of surface parking. The cost of building that parking will be roughly $348 million, or $26,242 per new employee, Williams said.

If incentives and policy changes are able to cut the percentage of downtown workers who drive solo to work to 69 percent, then the need for new parking spots will be reduced to 6,766, Williams’ figures show. That would reduce the cost of building parking to $241.6 million, a $106 million savings. The cost of providing parking would be reduced to $18,259 per new employee because fewer of those new employees would require parking stalls.

A reduction of 7 percentage points in the portion of workers driving to work alone is a relatively modest amount compared with what’s possible if downtown business people were willing to take some stronger measures.

In Portland’s Lloyd District, a business area across the Willamette River from downtown Portland, dramatic changes have occurred in just a few years.

NO FREE PARKING

In the eight years from 1999 to 2007, the percentage of Lloyd District workers driving to work alone had fallen from 60 percent to 42.4 percent while transit ridership rose from 21 percent to 38.2 percent. With dramatic increases in fuel prices in the last year, those drive-alone figures have fallen even more steeply and transit figure grown sharply, said Williams.

To foster those changes, the district’s employers and merchants took dramatic action. They formed a transportation and business improvement district to manage the commuting and parking changes. They then eliminated free parking both on the streets and in garages. Employers who formerly had provided free parking to employees ended that practice and began charging market rates. They also prohibited new surface parking lots. On the incentive side, they worked with local transit agencies to provide better service from where district workers lived to where they worked.

In Portland, the collection of workers addresses showed a large concentration living in the city’s southwest side. But taking transit from that area to the Lloyd district involved multistop routes that passed through downtown Portland and that in some cases required route transfers.

To give employers an incentive to use transit, employers offered workers free monthly transit passes and bargained with Portland transit providers to set up new commute-hour express routes to the Lloyd District from neighborhoods with high concentrations of Lloyd District workers.

The transit authority also gave Lloyd District employers reduced rates on monthly passes bought in bulk as an incentive to provide them to workers. Annual transit passes, for instance, cost employers $218 per pass compared with the $918 regular price.

For every 2,000 passes employers bought, the transit authority added one new bus line to the district.

Of course, the district’s location at the intersection of three Max light-rail routes also helped increase the number of workers using transit, Williams said. The decision to augment the light-rail routes serving the district, of course, was made easier by the fact that district workers had incentives to use whatever new light-rail lines that were built.

Eliminating free parking in the district also almost immediately brought a reduction of the district’s parking burden from 800 or so downtown workers who parked for free in the Lloyd District and then walked across bridges to downtown, said Williams.

Don’t expect those kind of changes in Tacoma in the near future, but the trend is moving that way, said city traffic engineer Kurtis Kingsolver.

“Free parking is going away downtown,” said Kingsolver. “There’s no doubt.”

INCREASED RETAIL REVENUE

A necessary early step in putting commute reduction strategies in place is to collect the home addresses of all downtown workers. Using geocoding software, those addressed are then mapped. That information is used to set up new transit routes.

Eliminating free or subsidized parking has obvious positive consequences for employers who have to build fewer new garages. But what of merchants and service providers who depend on auto driving customers?

Contrary to conventional wisdom, said Williams, charging for parking downtown, both for casual visitors and for full-time workers, can create more parking and more business for downtown businesses.

If fewer existing downtown workers use garage and streetside parking, then more spots are available for customers, albeit at a modest price.

Williams gave an example from Everett where the city and business people are trying to cut downtown daily employee parking needs by 815 stalls.

If those stalls, typically occupied eight hours a day by a single car, suddenly were empty, they could be used an average of four times over during daily by business customers. If each of those business customers spent just $20 downtown, downtown merchants would have $65,200 in additional daily revenue. Multiple that by 300 shopping days a year and freeing up those 815 spaces would create $19.56 million in additional downtown sales.

At this stage, Tacoma isn’t yet seriously talking about a ban on free parking downtown, but even installing metered parking on the street is expect to have a beneficial effect, said Campbell.

“What we’re hoping for is street parking that’s 85 percent utilized,” said Campbell. Parking rates should not be so expensive that they deter customers from coming downtown, but expensive enough to make serial parking downtown by full-time workers unattractive.

With 15 percent of the on-street spots available on average, open street parking spots will be available enough that customers won’t have to spend long periods circling the blocks hunting for an open space. The electronic kiosk-style parking will accept credit and debit cards as well as bills, eliminating another barrier to paid street parking, the availability of change.

STADIUM DISTRICT

Don’t expect metered parking to blanket the whole area that City Hall defines as downtown reaching from near the Tacoma Dome to the Stadium Business District and from the waterfront to Upper Tacoma.

Campbell expects that meters will be phased in starting with areas where parking is scarce.

“We’ve had some of the merchants near Ninth and Broadway, for instance, say they would welcome metered parking,” he said.

The notion of paid parking, despite it likely endorsement from the parking committee, doesn’t have universal appeal.

In the Stadium Business District, merchants have circulated a petition that’s gathered more than 1,000 signatures asking the city to leave their area off the list for metered parking.

While the area falls within the city’s downtown footprint, said Stadium merchant Deanna Rankos, its also a neighborhood business district competing with other neighborhood business districts where parking is free.

Campbell said he doesn’t expect the Stadium area to be included in the initial rollout of paid parking though it might be so in the more distant future.

The parking committee chairman, who has stores both downtown and in the Stadium area, said that as transit improves even Stadium area might benefit.

“I think the merchants would be surprised just how many of their own employees are parking in those free spots they want to keep open for their customers,” he said.

John Gillie: 253-597-8663

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The methods

 • The district banned all free parking both on the street and in garages.

 • Construction of new surface parking lots was prohibited.

 • Businesses provided employees with free transit passes.

 • Lloyd District employers negotiated the startup of new express bus routes from areas where workers lived to where they worked.

 • Bicycling was encouraged by providing secure parking facilities for bicycles and new bike paths and lanes.

 • Transit shelters were improved.

 • Minimum parking requirements were reduced.

The results 1997 2007

Drive alone 60% 42.4%

Rideshare 16% 11.5%

Transit 21% 38.2%

Bike 3% 4.6%

Walk 2% 2%

Telecommute 0% 1.3%

Compressed workweek 1% 1%