The overflow street parking from the SoCo shops and restaurants drives some Bouldin Creek homeowners nuts. They want a Residential Permit Parking Program, which would give them the exclusive right to park on "their" streets.
These complaints have always rankled me because the Bouldin Creek residents want to have their cake and eat it too. They enjoy all the benefits of proximity to SoCo (and increased property values), but they want the city to shield them from the costs. If this happens to crimp business for the SoCo shops and restaurants, so be it. Of course, the SoCo businesses opened up shop on the assumption that their customers could park on the streets. I see a rough equity in the current arrangement.
Equity aside, the RPP program is an inefficient solution to the problem of overflow parking. The street parking is likely more valuable to the businesses than to the residents; I suspect the businesses would outbid the residents if the city put the right to street parking up for bid. Yes, the street parking irritates the residents, but it's cheap to complain and cheap to demand something for free.
A better way to handle these conflicts is through Parking Benefit Districts. Under this program, the city installs parking meters on the streets, puts the revenue into a capital improvement project fund, and then uses some of that revenue for neighborhood improvements.
Parking Benefit Districts offer several advantages over Residential Permit Parking districts:
1. If the city prices the street parking right, a few spots will always be vacant. Drivers will not have to circle the blocks searching for vacant spots. (It's the equivalent of congestion pricing a road.) This will cut down on traffic, one of the neighborhood's main irritants.
2. Free parking distorts the incentives for both businesses and their patrons. Charging for parking gives patrons the incentive to factor in the full cost of driving, which might affect their decision whether to drive or take a bus or taxi instead. (Note that all of us benefit when late-night revelers are discouraged from driving.) Charging for parking also signals businesses when to build more parking.
3. PBDs generate revenue for the city, and provide a form of "soft" compensation for the inconvenience to neighbors.
4. PBDs eliminate the inequity of granting a windfall to the area homeowners at the expense of businesses that opened on the reasonable belief that these streets would be available for parking.
One final point. There are people who are happier living in suburbs and people who are happier living in urban neighborhoods. Urban neighborhoods always have more congestion, more noise and more strange people parking on the streets. Bouldin Creek, like many other central Austin neighborhoods, is becoming more urban. Over the long run, it will attract the kind of people who are more comfortable with the inconveniences of urban living. The city should not give in to the people fighting a rearguard action to maintain the the neighborhood as a semi-suburban enclave. It's better to give everyone the notice that parking meters provide: This is becoming an urban neighborhood, and the City won't try to stop it from happening.
