Sorry for the late notice on this. Alder Gruber's proposal to relax parking minimums in the Madison zoning ordinance will be heard by the alders tonight (meeting begins at 6:30).
Unfortunately, the proposal was substantially watered down in Plan Commission, which followed a staff recommendation. Gruber originally proposed reducing the current required minimums from 3.33 per 1000 square feet to 1 per 1000 square feet for office, medical office, and retail. The staff only supported a drop to 2.5 per 1000 square feet -- hardly a game-changing move. And that applies only to office; Gruber will come back in January with a proposal for other uses. Gruber's twin proposal, to institute parking maximums, was referred to several commissions for review and study. Regarding the staff report, which the Plan Commission followed: It's true that 1 per 1000 would be lower than average for U.S. cities (but the staff survey of other cities is small and leaves out some that have been more aggressive). But the typical practice in this area is ridiculous and results in massive oversupplies at most times. The staff never really address the issue of how much parking is actually being used or could be accommodated through sharing, pricing, etc. -- they basically look at a bunch of ordinances and figure they should be in the middle somewhere. They do have a table that shows ITE peak use figures, but these are, as the title suggests, peak use, and you don't design parking infrastructure for the peak. Usually it's for the 85th percentile, and even that leaves a lot of slack most of the time. And what they don't say is that any kind of use figures are always based on small samples and are not sensitive to important variables, such as surrounding land uses, presence of bike/ped/transit infrastructure, etc. And they are always for "free" parking; the numbers come down dramatically if there are charges, even small ones, to park. OK, end of rant. IMHO, Gruber's original proposal on minimums was a good chance for reform in an important area with long-term effect on the built environment. There are good arguments for doing away with minimums entirely, and though getting to that point is a political climb, results have been positive where it has been done. Anyway, it's an fyi to anyone who might want to send a note to an alder or show up tonight. Eric Sundquist
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