There’s No Parking Like Snow Parking
Cars parked on street in normal times.
On-street parking is great. Most city streets are already quite wide. Thirty- to forty-feet wide is common even for residential side streets, and often quite a bit more. We don’t need (or want) all that width for travel lanes, so parking cars helps narrow the street and slow cars. It also puts a couple tons of steel between you walking on the sidewalk and a car moving 25 mph in the street. (Though, it does reduce a driver’s ability to see pedestrians stepping off the curb, particularly little kids.) On-street parking also makes good use of all that pavement that the city already pays to build and maintain, and reduces the need for private land to be turned into parking lots. Backyards can be gardens. Vacant lots can become building sites.
Here in Providence, Rhode Island, twenty years ago you could park on the street—but not overnight, meaning you could visit your friends, but not stay over. Local oral history has it that on-street parking was done away with in the mid-20th century as the city struggled with decline and crime so that the police could easily drive around and know who was supposed to be there at night and who wasn’t. It was also seen as a brake on slum lords subdividing buildings, because they would have to find parking for all those little units, instead of tenants parking on the street.
In the last few decades, Providence, like many smaller postindustrial cities, has seen urban revival slowly build momentum. Among the changes were new residents who had lived in other cities with on-street parking and new buildings in need of somewhere to park. About 15 years ago, a forward-thinking neighborhood association (in the neighborhood where I live today) worked with their city councilor to pilot an overnight on-street parking program. There was a lot of resistance, particularly in other, single-family neighborhoods where on-street parking wasn’t really needed. But on the other hand, they were able to convince the administration that they already had the pavement and they should get something from it (in the form of selling permits).
After a few years of the sky not falling, the program was slowly rolled out to other neighborhoods until it applied generally across the city. The cultural transformation was not complete, however. After a generation or more of no overnight parking, the culture had gotten used to how easy that made plowing the streets (with no parked cars in the way). So when there’s a blizzard, the city issues a “snow parking ban,” meaning you have to get your car off the street. But the problem is that most people are parking on the street because they don’t have somewhere else to go. I’ve heard many versions of the desperate story of “where do I put this car so it doesn’t get ticketed and towed?”
Maybe this car didn’t have anywhere else to go.
This limitation means that the on-street parking program is today more of a “nice to have” rather than something you can count on as a permanent parking solution for your car. As a result, adoption as a first choice for urban parking has been slow and backyards and vacant lots are still getting paved for parking.
My own house has enough parking for all three units, but all things equal, I’d rather have more of that lot back for gardens, sheds, and outdoor space. I have friends and neighbors who don’t have that parking and I saw their struggles. I knew from living in other northeastern cities that it was possible for a city to plow the roads and still allow on-street parking.
Taking a Strong Towns Approach
Enter the Strong Towns movement: a bottom-up revolution in how we think about, plan for, and build communities that grows shared prosperity and resilience for everyone. They have a mantra for how to do public investment right:
Humbly observe where people in the community struggle.
Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle?
Do that thing. Do it right now.
Repeat.
Members of my community formed a small group of about four households, and a few other allies, with me taking the lead on organizing and communications.
Setting the Right Tone
The next step was to figure out what our message would be. We wanted to highlight the benefits both to individuals who had nowhere else to go, but also to the city at large. So we focused on how parked cars on the street improve safety by slowing traffic and protecting the sidewalk. We talked about how moving cars out of backyards and vacant lots would free up land for new homes (helping our housing crisis) and gardens that would help reduce storm water run-off. We also highlighted how on-street parking draws people out onto the street (out of their garages and driveways, increasing conviviality). Lastly, although the group organizing it included city planners, developers, lawyers, and academics, we set a tone that we were just doing this as neighbors. Nothing would be “innovative,” “experimental,” “dense,” etc. We used simple language, no jargon, and focused on how we were doing tried and true things that have worked here and elsewhere for millions of people.
Making a Splash
We started our campaign a year ago, in the middle of last winter, where the problems of the snow bans were in many people’s minds. We launched a change.org petition, sharing it around on Facebook, Twitter, Nextdoor, and through personal connections. We had over a 130 people sign it, mostly from our neighborhood. Now we had a constituency.
Making the Connections
Then, with our approach and our tone settled and a constituency at our back, we reached out to neighborhood elected officials, neighborhood organizations, and city staff. We came forward not stridently, but collaboratively, following the goals of our tone, above. We sought staff insights into the best way to design it. We lobbied city council and the mayor’s office. We didn’t demand action right away; we could wait for next year (this winter) so there was time to plan. We applauded every positive movement from within the city, and applied friendly relentless pressure when we didn’t hear back.
Map of the pilot area.
Bite Off What You Can Chew
In talking with folks from around the city, it was clear that many, many people were still attached to the old curb-to-curb clearance model (leaving aside that such an ideal was never achieved). We negotiated an alternate side parking scheme where cars would switch sides after the storm to allow the first side to be cleared. We agreed to do a pilot—no commitments for more than one winter—and to do that pilot on the streets where we ourselves live. Eventually settling on just seven streets in a small area, with the hope that if we were successful, the program could expand to other streets and neighborhoods where it made sense. We agreed with the city that we volunteers would take the lead on community outreach and achieving public buy in. We all mutually agreed that it wouldn’t be perfect the first time or the fifth time, it would be a learning process and that we’d work together to figure it out.
Do Your Own Outreach
I’m a former city planner. I agree that most community engagement is worse than useless. But we had been tasked by the Department of Public Works with ensuring there was no major public blow back. We did this by crafting a flier and canvassing every house (and parked car) on the subject streets. We also reached out over local social media, through local organizations, and directly to friends and neighbors and our change.org petition signers. In the end we had over 60 households, representing over a hundred units, sign up in support.
In that same time frame, we heard from maybe five really ornery people who thought this was the dumbest thing ever. Keeping to our goals though, I engaged with each ornery person. I never assumed I would change their mind. But I would give them an opportunity to be heard. I would acknowledge their feelings, while sharing the other values that we thought were being served by this effort. Oftentimes people were upset generally, often by bad past experiences, and were spoiling for a fight. Don’t give it to them. Honor their feelings, express sympathy, and offer them a place in improving the neighborhood. In several cases, people had good ideas that we could use to tweak the program or address other issues in the neighborhood.
Do It, Do It Right Now
The Friday of the first week of January we faced our first test, a snow storm dropping up to eight inches across the region. The city called a snow emergency and parking ban. We got the word out about the pilot snow parking in our area, stuck fliers on cars, dived into social media complain-fests, and fielded phone calls and emails from anxious parkers: ”Which side of the street is the even side?”
Document, Iterate, Improve, and Share
As we went through that first storm, our little team documented what we were seeing on street with the parked cars and plows. We took pictures and shared them with our DPW contact. We collected emails, texts, and social media messages. As the storm wrapped up, we shared what we had collected with the city. We debriefed with staff and set some goals for improvement with the next storm. We added new names to our supporter and email lists. We reached out to people from other neighborhoods who wished the program were happening in their place. We took special care of some of our oppositional neighbors, helping shovel their street and sidewalk before a hard freeze—just a little gesture to build goodwill. And we’re getting ready for the next storm with more communication, outreach, and help.
Count Your Blessings and Move When the Stars Align
We have been very fortunate in moving this initiative forward. We could easily have encountered more resistant city staff, dismissive elected officials, or territorial local organizations. We like to think we played our cards well, even if we had a good hand at the table. You don’t always get those situations, but when you do, strike hard and make a change. Create the positive momentum that says, “Yes, we can do things, We can make things better.” Yes is good.
The next day, we were very pleased to get some favorable press in the local paper. That’s lucky, too. But I think we helped it along with the Strong Towns approach that we used. We were responding to a real hardship that affects a lot of people, and we were just some neighbors trying to help out with creativity and common sense. Proactive, bottom-up change makes for a good story.
Strong Towns members are taking action to make their communities stronger and more resilient. Join with advocates like Seth Zeren and become a member today, so you can start creating success stories in your city or town!
Seth Zeren is a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer, advocate, and educator. Seth is a founding member of Strong Towns and occasional contributor over the years. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to the East Coast for college and settling down in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lives with his wife and two young kids. He writes at Build the Next Right Thing.