Park & Hide: Downtown parking meter program halted, but downtown parking problem remains

While many people and businesses are happy that the parking meter program downtown has been suspended, everyone seems to have forgotten why it was implemented in the first place: to reduce congestion downtown and make it easier to find a place to park.

As a 2008 downtown parking study determined, parking availability wasn’t necessarily the problem (there were 6000 recorded parking spaces in Downtown Charlottesville, of which about 5,000 (84%) were off-street and about 1,000 (16%) were on-street, and 1,200 were private )— the free two-hour on-street parking spaces were. As the study pointed out, commuters and other long-stay visitors were creating a problem for short-stay visitors, i.e. shoppers, eaters, concert goers, etc. because they were monopolizing the “two-hour” free on-street spaces. Indeed, the study found that the two-hour spaces exceeded 85% occupancy during the day and that 20% stayed over the two-hour limit and that 10% of those using the two-hour spaces were either perform…