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PARKING There is not always agreement on how much
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“Parking is always an issue but in most cases where you have transit available we probably are building more parking than needed,” said Douglas Foy, the chief of commonwealth development under Gov. Mitt Romney.
Whether that’s the case in Quincy will require analysis and study. Quincy Center has about 1,450 municipal spaces in the Ross Garage and Hancock lot and another 473 on-street spaces.
Should more parking be needed, officials may want to consider a variety of techniques employed by communities elsewhere.
Take shared parking. The idea is this: Parking spaces at churches and other institutional facilities, for example, might be full in the morning but empty later in the day. To optimize the spaces, the church might lease some to stores, restaurants or other businesses that have a greater need for parking in the afternoon or evening, said Stuart Meck, a senior research fellow with the American Planning Association.
Quincy regulations allow parking to be leased within 300 feet of the premises to meet off-street requirements.
Changing on-street parking from parallel to angled can also add spaces to urban centers, said Andy Wiley-Schwartz of the Project for Public Spaces, a New York City nonprofit organization.
When it comes to residential parking, the issue can get trickier.
David Dixon, the city’s urban design consultant from the Boston firm Goody, Clancy & Associates, said it’s important for all housing to have on-site parking. The city currently requires between 1.5 and two parking spaces per residential unit, depending on how the property is zoned.
Not everyone agrees with Dixon.
In Portsmouth, N.H., city officials wanted to encourage housing downtown but knew there was not enough space for adequate parking at each individual site, particularly when apartments were created above ground-floor retail.
To address the situation, the city makes developers or property owners contribute $500 to a municipal account for each required parking space they cannot provide. That money is then used to build public parking in garages or other off-site locations. Residents can park there overnight.
Other cities require less parking the closer a housing development is to public transportation, since residents likely moved there because of the convenience of the subway, Meck said.
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