Let’s start off by thinking about why we need parking in downtown Austin.  
At one time the only reason to have parking in downtown was for people visiting shops and stores, primarily in the daytime – and remember late hours on Thursdays?

But beginning in the 1980s, tall office buildings were built serving more than just state government.  That meant that people now came to downtown office to work – again mostly during the daytime.  Then beginning in the early 2000s, apartments and condominiums were built for people to live in downtown Austin.

For over one hundred years, most of the businesses in downtown Austin were involved in state government or supported the people who worked in state government.  The office building density was relatively low, creating a low demand for worker parking.   Today, there are business headquarters and service centers in downtown Austin with a much greater density or workers per square foot.  Since most of these workers still travel into downtown Austin for work (though some live downtown), the need for parking for downtown workers has increased significantly.   Unfortunately, most downtown development has not provided adequate parking in private locations for these workers.  Many workers in downtown Austin use public parking lots.  And this does not even take into account visitors to these businesses who must also use public parking, because developments also do not provide enough visitor parking.  Residential developments have also skimped on providing parking.  While there are regulations for commercial and residential buildings to provide adequate tenant/patron parking, there are not requirements for residential buildings to provide visitor parking space.  And in 2013, the City of Austin eliminated these requirements for development in downtown Austin.  As a result, visitors to businesses and residences in downtown Austin must search out public parking.   

Since Austin became the Live Music Capital of the World in the 1970s, it began to attract people downtown for live music and other entertainment.  For a time, this was not a problem, as most state employees vacated their parking spaces by about 4 PM every day.  And at one time you could park in the state office parking garages for free after hours and on weekends.  Not anymore.  And now there is a lot more to bring people into downtown Austin after hours than just live music.   Just consider all of the highly rated restaurants that are found in downtown Austin.  And virtually none of them have assigned parking for workers or patrons.

Finally, less than 15 years ago, we were caught in a situation where there were more tourists and business people coming to downtown Austin than we had hotel rooms for.  The hotel industry has rapidly caught up.  But parking in these hotels is not adequate for their guests, much less for people who drive downtown from the Austin area or from elsewhere in the state to attend conferences and meetings at those hotels.

We need parking in downtown Austin for businesses, their workers and patrons, for downtown residents and their guests, and for visitors at conferences or on vacation, or visitors just enjoying the amenities of downtown.  In developing a parking plan, how do we prioritize?

Over 100,000 people work in the downtown area.  Most of these workers travel into downtown Austin on most days (when there is not a pandemic), and most of them drive solo.   Employers provide parking for most of these workers (the State of Texas Parking garages for example).  These workers do help drive the downtown economy, but mostly for just 8 hours a day five days a week.  

While about 15,000 people live in downtown Austin, about 75,000 people visit Austin on any given day, and many of them come to downtown Austin.  Visitors to downtown Austin are spending money on everything, including parking.  Those of us who live downtown may not contribute to the downtown economy on most days.  Visitors to downtown Austin contribute significantly to the downtown economy, particularly after business hours.   We want visitors to come to downtown Austin, and to encourage them to come downtown, there needs to be economical parking.  I would propose that the first priority for downtown Austin parking should be for visitors to downtown.   

But a parking plan prioritizing economical parking for visitors may not start with creating parking spaces for those visitors.  In 2013 city ordinance eliminated parking ratios for commercial and residential development in the downtown area.  The idea was that if they could not find parking, people would find alternatives to driving into downtown.  
That has not worked, mostly because in Austin, as in most of Texas, there are not good alternatives to driving a car.  I think that a new parking plan should begin with new regulations for parking associated with commercial and residential development.  Downtown Austin might have enough public parking if commercial and residential buildings provided adequate parking for their own tenants and visitors.  Unfortunately, this regulation cannot be grandfathered, so there is a need to create more public parking.

Take for example the downtown condominium where I live.  It is a high rise with 192 residences, and there is a designated parking space for each bedroom.  When it was built, there were six designated visitor spaces and two additional handicapped spaces.  Immediately, this was not enough, so landscaping was removed for four additional visitor spaces.   I had the opportunity to live in a high-rise apartment building on Rainey Street that had 187 residencies and two visitor parking spaces and two handicapped spaces.   Obviously, the developers saved money by not including adequate visitor parking in their design, anticipating that visitors would use public parking.  My experience is that the number of visitor spaces required for a residential building downtown would be about one visitor space per 10 residences, or 20 spaces for a residential building with about 200 units.   Austin needs to regulate development immediately to ensure that future residential buildings provide for adequate parking.

Commercial buildings downtown also need to provide adequate parking for all of their employees and visitors based on estimates of building density.  And now we have many buildings that are a mixture of commercial and residential.  There should be adequate parking provided by the developer for residents, employees, patrons and visitors.  If this is not done, the city of Austin will have to spend money developing more public parking.

What about the parking problem that already exists?  Unfortunately, the city of Austin will have to expand public parking to meet the needs of visitors to downtown.   In 2017, the Downtown Austin Alliance and the City of Austin commissioned a study and completed a report, The Downtown Austin Parking Strategy.  The City has executed shared parking agreements providing for discounted monthly parking rates at a number of locations.  This helps employees working downtown, but mostly for after business hours and weekends.  Otherwise, very little seems to have been done consistent with the recommendations in this report, most of which make sense.  

Immediately, the City of Austin should execute short-term shared parking agreements to provide public parking at private garages.  This should be directed to areas where public parking is needed, the 6^th Street area, Congress Avenue, West 2^nd Street, Rainey Street and anywhere else that significant combined commercial and residential development is scheduled.  The City should require or provide for safe parking, with pedestrian access to local businesses, and consistent signage indicating public parking, hours available and pricing.  Parking rates should be reasonable to incentivize visitors to park in these locations.

Once all shared parking opportunities are considered, the City may need to build one or more parking garages in areas of high use.   In the future, surface lots will all be developed, and there won’t be any place to put parking garages.  The time is now to secure these areas for multi-level parking development.

In the future developers should be required add public parking as part of commercial or residential (and combined) developments.  At the very least developers should be required to participate in shared parking agreements.

One thing that The Downtown Austin Parking Strategy report noted was the differential between most parking rates provided by the City of Austin versus other public parking operated by private vendors.  In September of 2020, the City changed this differential by instituting graduated parking rates leading to a $39 total for 10 hours (or $4 per hour) for City parking operations.    We will have to see how this works out.  It would be great if there was alternative affordable parking near points of interest (say garage parking), but currently there is not.  That is why people in the study spent up to 20 minutes looking for City parking.    The result of this pricing may be to discourage visitors to downtown Austin.  That is not what we want to do if visitors are our first priority.

I first wrote this blog in 2020. Since then the City of Austin has created about 300 miles of stripes, flexible barriers or curbed bike lanes. They have eliminated or narrowed traffic lanes to create the bicycle lanes on some of Austin’s busiest streets, including Slaughter Lane and Brodie Lane. But very few cyclists are using the new bicycle lanes. The reason according to surveys: fear of injury or death in a collision with a car. Cyclists report increased aggressive driving on streets with designated bicycle lanes. The City reports slowed traffic and decreased crashes on these streets. Since 2020, 15 cyclists have died and 117 have suffered serious injuries from crashes in Austin. There were 6 deaths and 75 serious injuries in 2023. Crashes involving cyclists are going up – despite what the City of Austin says about the benefit of bicycle lanes.

For over one hundred years, traffic in Austin was engineered to accommodate cars and trucks, not bicycles or scooters.  After Governor Rick Perry vetoed a bicycle safety bill in 2009, cities like Austin began to try and merge bicycle traffic into automobile traffic with 3-feet passing laws, designated bike lanes and bicycle traffic signals.  Then in early 2018, electric scooters hit the streets.  At first, there were no laws for or regulation of scooters, but the Austin City Council did finally regulate scooter vendors and create micro-mobility regulations for scooters.   Problem is, these rules are poorly written and almost unenforceable.

I would propose that there is no way to safely merge bicycles and scooters onto many Downtown Austin streets that were engineered for cars and trucks.   Painting a narrow bicycle lane on most busy streets may not provide the 3-feet zone required between a bicycle and an automobile.  There are many places that bicycles should just not be allowed – like Mopac.  I would also argue that bicycles should also not be allowed in the traffic lanes on the most congested downtown streets (Cesar Chavez, Congress, 5^th and 6^th streets to name a few).  It is not safe for bicyclists to operate in these areas, and bicycles in traffic lanes impede already congested automobile traffic.  This all applies to electric scooters as well

And then there is the issue of parking bicycles and scooters.   It is not much of a problem for bicycles, for two reasons.  First there aren’t that many bicycle riders downtown.  Second, if you leave a bicycle on a street or sidewalk in Downtown Austin it is likely not going to be there when you return.   The issue with parking is electric scooters.  They are left everywhere, even though regulations prohibit blocking streets or sidewalks.  They are a constant nuisance and a concern for safety.

The Austin City Council and bicycle advocates want access to all city streets and roadways.  They argue that use of bicycles will reduce traffic congestion.  We have had enough experience to know that that is not true, mostly because we can’t convince enough people to risk their lives to bicycle regularly in the downtown area.  The same argument has been made for scooters, but I see people primarily riding scooters for entertainment.  At the same time, we should be able to make bicycling a safe mode of transportation downtown.  I think that the way to do this is to create bicycle routes on specific streets, and prohibit bicycles on other streets.  Bicycle routes need to be marked, have designated bicycle lanes with 3-feet zones, and need to be mapped so that you can reach any location by bicycle and a short walk.  Electric scooters should be regulated to the same routes.

This is where we talk about pedestrians (note pedestrians in the title of this blog).  Fatalities and serious injuries remain a serious problem in Austin. Walking should be the preferred mode of travel between locations downtown.  It is hard enough to cross streets looking out for cars, without dodging scooters and bicycles who ignore traffic signals and use sidewalks.  Sidewalks should be safe and comfortable for pedestrians in the downtown area, and bicycle and scooter riding should be prohibited on sidewalks.  Bicycles and scooters can be walked on a sidewalk from one bike route to another. 

So how do we implement bicycle and electric scooter safety?  First, we create a downtown zone for special ordinances.  Then we map this zone to create bicycle and scooter routes around downtown.  The routes need to be engineered to accommodate bicycles with marked routes, striped lanes and safety barriers as needed.  New regulations should require use of these routes and prohibit bicycles and scooters on other streets in the downtown zone.  Also, in the downtown zone, bicycles and scooters should follow pedestrian rules at intersections with stop signs or stop lights.  Bicycles and scooters should be prohibited from sidewalks in the downtown zone, except when they are being walked between bicycle routes.What about parking?  Bicycle rentals already have designated parking areas.  There should be more bicycle parking stands for those who are brave enough to leave their bicycle unattended downtown.  Designated parking zones need to be created for scooters, and electric scooters should only be parked in those areas (same goes for the increasingly popular moped-type scooters – Vespa type scooters which have a top speed > 20 mph should operate as motorcycles).  Rules for businesses who want to create a scooter parking area should be developed (they could stripe a parking spot for scooters).  Sidewalks and entryways should not be blocked in any way.  Scooter riders who are actually using scooters for transportation to downtown attractions, restaurants and hotels will not be inconvenienced by these rules.  Scooter vendors should be fined for illegally parked scooters.  It won’t take long for these vendors to pass fines along to the riders. 

The City of Austin’s priority this summer is to enforce parking bans in bicycle lanes. Maybe that is a sign they have put the lanes in the wrong place.