Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, July 13, 2010,
Item 6
>> item number 6, consider and take appropriate action related to the parking assessment findings for the travis county central campus master plan including a, existing conditions, b, bench marking, c, preliminary need projections for the 25-year planning horizon, and d, key planning assumptions for the 25-year planning horizon. Good morning.
>> good morning, judge, commissioners. As we continue working through the development of the scenarios to present to the commissioners court some month from now, we are working through all the various buildings of those components as with the phase 1 we developed scenarios where we were able to identify current and future staffing needs as well as the square footage. What we come to you today for is for a discussion on guiding principles, if you will, as it relates to the development of the scenarios. We are not asking for a decision today. What we're simply doing is wanting to present the information in anticipation of coming back on the 20th for approval of the recommendations so that we can go forward. With that, i'll turn it over to steven coalston from broaddus and the parking consultant for the specifics and be happy to answer any questions you might have.
>> good morning, judge, commissioners. I'm joined by kirk taylor, who is with data engineering. Some of you have met with them through the course of the project. There's really kind of one -- you received a little bit of information in backup for the conversation today that relates to some of our early numbers that we're still working on testing and refining related to the draft projected requirements. As well as a little bit of detail about some of the inventory that we did on the -- kirk and his team actually did on the street on some key days in april looking at some of the peak time frames. We've also met with the steering committee on this. We've met a couple times with representatives from the parking committee as well as subcommittee of the commissioners court. And so what we wanted to do was kind of review a couple of key issues that really have to do with -- much like some of the conversation we had in our phase one, visitation of assumptions related to staffing projections, which actually informed our space program, and the ultimate square footage projections for that program. We likewise need to address some assumptions related to parking policies because they will have a significant policy on our planning as it relates to a pretty big space hog as an entity or component of program requirements that actually utilize real estate as we look at our different planning scenarios. So this is the -- this is the slide that -- the current reality that we have today is we know there are 650 people that are sitting on a waiting list for up to seven years for a parking space. And, you know, we've puzzled over that and kind of wondered what it is that's causing that, and i think the first bullet speaks to that. Current there are dedicated reserve spaces per staff and employee that essentially underutilize the existing inventory that you have in off-street designated parking. We also understand that about 2% of your employees use alternatives to single occupancy vehicle transportation modes. And that we see that there's probably generally speaking some opportunities for improvement in those areas. So what we did was really kind of tackled this issue in our discussions about, you know, what is the impact when we do inventory and we discover, which we did in the detailed information that we provide, provides a little backup for what we found in terms of existing inventory. I'm actually flipped to that for just a second. We -- we looked at peak observation days in april on a friday, which actually turns out for the days that we surveyed to be one of the most frequent days because we actually have a lot of visitors, not jurors, but visitors that are coming to get folks out of jail on fridays before the weekend occurs. And in fact, that was actually a peak for us rather than our jury call day. We -- we -- we also surveyed on a monday, which is a day that we typically have for jury call, and we worked real closely with the clerk's office and our project management team to identify what the average -- the average number of that call would end up being and we basically plugged in number of jurors on an average basis for what a monday would look like and found out there was significant on street and off-street dedicated parking that was available. We have on the next sheet of your backup a little more detail about some of those calculations and observations, but what i really -- what we really kind of wanted to focus on rather than getting into the details of all the number, i think i can suffice it to say, generally speaking, is there -- under the current parking policy, there is -- there is a underutilization of your current parking spaces, and a different kind of parking policy strategy would allow you to better utilize that. And the impact on that has a direct correlation to cost as relates to whether we would need to build more parking structures to accommodate the existing parking policy or whether we can revisit as a planning assumption a revised policy. Like our discussion in phase 1 of the needs assessment when we talked about staffing projections, we had a discussion that the staffing projections that we were using were for -- were an approved assumption for planning purposes, recognizing that annually you go through a budgeting process that actually looks whether you are going to add new staff salaries, et cetera. Likewise, we recognize that there's a lot of ground that will need to be plowed, if you will, in close -- through a lot of deliberate discussions about how the parking policies end up evolving, whether there's costs involved, what the structure of it is, how it gets phased in, is it out sourced, in sourced, but there are high level issues we want to bring to you today that are related to policy decisions that we need you to think about and vote on in a couple weeks as it relates to an impact on how we physically plan. The first one is really having to do with how we subscribe to permits currently. Right now we actually have dedicated parking spaces that are reserved parking spaces for employees. Which is not the industry norm. One of the things that kirk did, he actually bench marked all the similar urban counties in the state of texas. And we are the -- we're the only county that has this policy currently of dedicated reserve spaces. The industry trend on parking is essentially to work with zoned parking. So folks do actually get a permit for parking, but it's not a permit to a dedicated parking space. The -- the -- there are ranges within the standard between overparking by 10 to 30% for the. For the purposes of planning, we are proposing an assumption of 20% oversubscription for the current parking. That's basically reflecting underutilization of --
>> 85% occupied.
>> on our survey dates we found we were about 85% occupancy on any given day. If you oversubscribe by 120%, then that accommodates the space that typically are empty parking spaces that are available for employees off site, traveling, six, on vacation, sick, et cetera. There's details that would have to be worked out in terms of the assignment of where those parking zones would actually occur in terms of proximity or seniority or mobility or other other issues of security, but the -- the key issue would be focusing on that notion of fully utilizing the parking that's there. Now, there is a caveat to that which has to do with really managing the permits and how those are issued. The notion is if you have shun parking spaces, you would actually issue 120 permits. The -- the step-back on that in terms of managing those permits is we recommend a 5% buffer. And that comes from -- that's kind of another industry norm is keeping -- is keeping about a 5% buffer in there for parking so that those people who leave for a doctor's appointment during the day or have to go to a meeting or take care of personal business that come back, that there's still a sense that you can still get a parking space and that there's availability there. So we would also factor in the projection of the 5% buffer related to the oversubscription of the parking. So that's -- that's really probably the most fundamental policy issue direction decision that we need from you as it relates to staff, employee, public elected, appoint official parking. The second issue really has to do with guests, jurors, visitors what. We found, again, similar urban counties do provide some kind of parking for their jurors. It varies in terms of the impact delivery between the different counties. But there are some -- there are several slices of detail that you would need to consider as you think about this whole notion of providing parking for guests. The first one is whether you will or not. Then if the question is yes -- if the answer to that is no, then we can -- we can move on, we can share a little more about what the inventory is. If the answer to that is yes, then there are a whole series of subset of questions that come along with that. The first being if yes, how much. And to that we basically have an observation that looks at what our typical jury call date looks like, and that's reflected in the second bullet under this -- the first bullet under this notion of providing parking for guests and visitors. Average call day is 490 jurors. Your average number of jurors per week is about 145. So part of the question is if your answer were yes to we're going to provide juror or visitor parking of how much, do we provide it for the average number of jurors or do we provide it for jury call day. Do we do it for the day after thanksgiving, if you will, or do you plan it for the average day of the year. The -- there are other aspects in terms of how you would handle that. If you did build a garage for 490 spaces, it would largely, you know, be sitting empty on a day like today. So there's other ways that you could -- you could start getting into subset questions of this. The third bullet on here represents the notion of alternatives to actually adding more spaces. On that jury call day where we have the peak in number of folks that are on campus, we actually -- you could consider an alternative of having flexible hours. You know, do you have 490 of your employees that have the alternative to not come to work, you know, to work in a flex time environment on mondays. The challenge of that is we also have friday that is a peak day that is as much or worse than our monday jury call day. Or the alternative is you physically add those parking spaces. And then the last thing that -- related to this that i ask that you consider is, we had some conversations with different representatives from the steering committee and one of the things that we've heard is that there -- there is a sense from the community that there was parking provided for jurors by travis county in the past, back when you used to use palmer auditorium or able to use the dillo to get up to the site and that's obviously not in existence as a utilized resource today. What we found was that there are stacks of tickets that are actually showing up on, you know, the judge's desk that they are being asked to resolve that are being handed to them by jurors on a regular basis. What we found is we started looking at our inventory analysis of on-street parking, and we did that for an inventory area that was within one block of all of the designated sites within our central campus planning area. We found that there was, as you can kind of see on the -- is it on this slide?
>> on the previous.
>> yeah. Today if you take -- if you take friday the 16th or monday the 19th, if we use the juror on-street parking, there was about 519 spaces. Those are spaces sitting undesignated. The challenge with those spaces and i guess part of something for your consideration is whether there is adequacy of on-street parking that is already available. The problem seems to be less an issue of inventory, and again, this seems to be a little bit of an issue of policy. And it actually ends up becoming a little bit of a inter governmental discussion. The problem doesn't appear to be that there is not a parking spot for the -- that juror that's handing in the ticket because obviously they are in a parking space because they have a ticket for that space. And in fact, according to inventory data, there may actually be an empty parking space right next to them. The problem is that they are fulfilling their civic duty i as a juror and they are exceeding the time limitation that is on the city of austin parking meters. So from a policy perspective, that goes back to one of our observations from our community meetings. And i think one of our take-aways from the last time i was here which was please, please, please work with other government entities as you go through this planning process. Whether it's physical planning, policy issues. And this is an issue that comes to mind that if both travis county and both the city of austin are -- and even for that matter the state of texas are having issues with the cost and the requirements for bringing more single occupancy vehicles into the downtown area, and that's a challenge that we're all trying to address collectively there may be some policy adjustment that would accommodate and whether the county chose to subsidize to make jury parking, but is there a demand to build more parking spaces for that visitor parking or is there a way that that parking could be accommodated with existing parking. The last on the list related to policy decisions in materials of assumptions, much like you have been doing over the last several years, is to continue to incentivize utilization to single occupancy vehicle travel. Our data suggests from working with our various transportation consulting experts and with our parking planners that even under the robust utilization of alternative transportation methods, the policies are going to result in somewhere between a 3 to 5% maximum alternative usage. Now, that's based on all things being equal. We can't predict 9-11s, i definitely can't predict the price of gasoline next year or the year after. There are a lot of other alternative incentives that could come into place that might encourage people to use alternative means of transportation. But we think it's a healthy and conservative approach to assume a transportation policy maximum of about 3% for alternative transportation. And that would assume that you would continue to grow your current utilization of 2% up to 3% through some alternative uses. Again, that goes back to working with the city who is looking at rail bond programs and capital metro who the looking at bus rapid transit and we're integrating those discussions into our plan. The last comment that i think i will make, and it's really count of counter intuitive to our discussion that we've had to date which is really more about policy issues and less about costs. Is we have -- we recognize that's going to be a challenging discussion, but as you start thinking about alternative incentives, there are incentives such as the price of gasoline and cost is one of those great incentives that has an impact on demand. And the factors that we're bringing forward to you today in terms of policy do not factor in an alternative approach on how you handle the cost of parking. So were you to charge for parking, that would have reciprocal impact on the level of demand. There are approach us you could utilize and the last bullet talks to that. If you were able to begin to charge for parking, you could again utilize some of the programs like you have in place today for your alternative transportation methods that would allow -- that could allow for parking to be charged on a pre-tax basis that created revenue stream --
>> [one moment, please, for change in captioners]
>> several hundreds of parking slots are out there at the expo center. I don't know if that can even be in the scheme of things, but i thought about them being available, the judge of course sin undated with -- inundated with what i heard tickets that persons want to serve jury duty and they come down and serve with the jury selection process and end up getting tickets and of course they end up looking for resolution of those particular tickets. So i thought that maybe if there is anything in your plans of looking at something as far as some of the selection process, going through the process of dealing with a jury as far as things of that nature as far as parking downtown is concerned that facilities that we already own that have parking may be made available to any degree than what we have right now because it is -- it is a tough situation down here. And i guess it goes for anything else that people are doing here. I'm just trying to maybe put out some available opportunities where parking may be available or made available to folks. So just an idea. What would you -- has that been considered at all?
>> a couple of thoughts, commissioner, if i may. The -- there are plenty of spaces in all the wrong places.
>> in all the wrong places.
>> [ laughter ]
>> there are free spaces out at the expo center and your challenge is dual -- double fold here in that it's not just the jury, but it's also the high visitor demand that we observe on friday mornings. They do run shuttles from remote locations for jury call parking, but unfortunately that will not help us with our friday morning situation.
>> friday morning, right.
>> yes, sir.
>> it used to be -- i know there's a big squabble right now that's going on with not having capital metro. In fact, i received some information and this was brought up before about having cap metro service operating out there at the expo center, just going directly out there back and forth. Yeah, the travis county exposition center, because of the availability of parking. And the concern was that the residents that live out there on decker lane, 3177 actually, were concerned about bus service. A lot of folks have moved out there, so they brought -- that's one concern, but then another concern was actually getting cap metro service to -- just as you see shuttles or you see facilities where people go and park their vehicles and they catch a shuttle type situation into town. I don't know, but i'm just laying it out. I have heard that it would take governmental relations and inner cooperation i guess to ensure that we need -- you mentioned the city of austin, but i think it's bigger than city of austin, bigger than travis county. I feel that there's more to it than that. And what i'm trying to say, whatever it takes to help solve the problem, i'm just -- just laying something out to see if it's been taken into consideration.
>> definitely under consideration.
>> so cap metro i think is a link into that.
>> absolutely.
>> in other words in other words, folks park their cars at the expo center, especially when you don't have live events, you have plenty of parking out there. And of course just unused parking that travis county has. And if cap metro can run shuttles from the expo center to downtown as a common meeting place as far as access is concerned, it's accessible from all points of the city with sh 130, 290 and all that other area out there. It appears that should be an option that may need to be looked at to resolve this problem. But of course you need capital metro's consideration and cooperation, which again would help in this whole type situation that we're dealing with.
>> so that -- that could be one decision that is made by the court.
>> i understand.
>> is that we would choose to take our peak demand period for jury call and work together with other governmental agencies or look at our other utilized -- underutilized parking spaces on other county owned property and address that demand requirement through either an alternative of utilizing the existing on street parking that exists in the inventory today, but is getting ticketed, or through a shuttle system that would have a direct implication on whether you would build or not build structured parking to accommodate those. So that could be --
>> that's huge as far as i'm concerned, especially in the amount of money that would be maybe spent. Those need to be laid out for evaluation and see what the situation s i don't know if the cooperation of the city of austin would be to point where they would relinquish some of the deals as far as their meters as far as where people are parking. And i don't -- i don't know what kind of policy that would have to be invoked to say okay, city of austin here we are, but we've got folks coming down here and doing what they have to do, but how do we get around that. And so again i'm looking at existing space that we already have and i think the expo center is a good example of a lot of parking and cap metro being able to shuttle people in.
>> may i ask, you had mentioned that probably a conservative thing to shoot for northward to non-single occupancy commute is about three percent.
>> five percent.
>> three to five percent is the range?
>> yeah.
>> so the conservative end is the three percent?
>> yes.
>> with regard to the number of spaces, it seems clear from the presentation from the backup documentation that you've provided that we're underutilizing our current space. It says seven year waiting list for how many employees?
>> 650.
>> and you had calculated through observation that on peak fridays 81%, which is to say 19% of our off-street parking spaces, are empty?
>> that's true.
>> at peak?
>> at peak.
>> and on mondays 23% of our off-street parking spaces are empty at peak?
>> at peak.
>> so what does that translate into -- into with regard to how many spaces?
>> with the number of spaces that the county currently leases, just for conversation today, if we said that you have 2,000 spaces at your disposal, when we talk about 20% empty, we're talking about 400 spaces being empty.
>> so just so employees understand that, there's 600 and change people waiting for a space, and on peak days -- at peak times there are 400 spaces that are empty because of -- and tell me if i'm correct about the speculation. Because of a policy of assigning spaces and providing them for free.
>> exactly correct.
>> now, with regard -- i'm going to make an analogy here with regard to, for instance, the health benefits. In health benefits we ask employees to contribute because we have found over, you know, years of study here and elsewhere that through an employee participation in the cost, then you get a more efficient system. Would you posit that by having some kind of cost associated both with employee parking and juror or visitor parking that you would get a better utilization of the actual capacity and more people would be able to avail themselves of the benefit? We'd be able to spread the benefit more widely.
>> you would definitely find that a benefit. By implementing a pay for parking system, you would have the opportunity to engage professional management that would be responsible for optimizing utilization of your existing facilities at a net revenue that would have zero impact on county revenue. They would pay for themselves. With pricing policy, you are then able to also manage where the demand occurs. We can afford preferred rate parking for jurors, discounted rate, free parking for jurors. When nobody is paying for anything, there is no disincentive to bringing a single occupancy vehicle. So i feel like a subsidized paid-for-parking approach would help the county get its arms around its current assets, manage its assets better and reduce the total number of spaces required in the future for the same number of employees.
>> you maze a good point that isn't in the backup for jurors and visitors so that there would be zones of premium for pay, standard for pay and some area of free that would probably be more remote.
>> well said.
>> there could be.
>> currently with regard to the city of austin meters, we did have a number of free spaces within a certain proximity, but once those meters went in, those spaces are now no longer utilized. But again, according to your backup, only 61% of on street parking -- actually, it was even lower than that, wasn't it? At peak -- at peak it's safe to say that somewhere not as good as -- more than 40% of on street compass si is not being used even at peak. So it's not that there isn't parking, there's not free park.
>> in the policy recommendation that steven alluded to, which is consistent with policies in other counties, would simply issue with a jury call a parking pass for on street parking. And what that would allow is for people, whether they're parked for the day or parked for the four hours just to avoid receiving a ticket. At $8 a day for 900 spaces on the street, the city is making $720,000 a year off of those spaces.
>> how much?
>> the city is making approximately 720,000, three-quarters of a million dollars a year off of those spaces. The ticket revenue within that same zone is a small percentage of that. So if you would go to the city and say work with us or we're going to build and we'll take that $720,000 of revenue away from your streets, they're our trips, we generate them, so we might as well benefit from them, i think they would be more than happy to work with you on subsidizing a five dollar, six dollar discounted jury rate parking. Still acts as a disincentive to bringing a car, but encourages people to use alternative modes of transportation. But makes it clear that the county is providing parking.
>> and it utilizes a parking space that already exists.
>> we don't have to build 500 more spaces when they're already sitting empty on the street.
>> and this is a system that probably could be integrated into our i-jury system to make it maximally effective.
>> that's exactly the types of parking passes i say issued on all of the government websites.
>> i had one question on methodology because one of the statements you made don't seem to ring true. When you talked about peak capacity or peak iewt lice liezization on -- iewt laysization on monday or friday, i could see where that might be public utilization, but i would think for employee utilization that would certainly not be the peak because a lot of people when they take a vacation will take a monday off or a friday. So i would think if you're looking at employee parking that mondays and fridays would not represent the peak, but would more represent the low. So i was confused. Did you separate those or put them together?
>> we observed that on friday afternoons the -- friday -- i should say friday mornings, 1634 spaces were used by county employees in county-owned facilities. On monday morning we only observed 1553. There was a 90 space delta. And there's just -- on the monday and friday we chose --
>> were lower, though. It's not peak for employees on monday and friday, right? What you're saying is it's lower -- i would expect lower utilization on monday and friday for employees.
>> actually, we could go back and look at the parking committee because the parking committee did this as well and i believe that the -- correct me if i'm wrong, but you were provided the parking committee's statistics and they also indicated on tha on any given day's peak there was a 15 to 20 percent utilization, i believe.
>> that's consistent.
>> in these other areas that have this zone, when a person goes out, like my auditors are a good example, they go out to the tax office, do an audit and come back and there is no space, what do we do with them? Does the county pay for them to go to private parking? Do we tell them go home for the day? Do we say -- from a management viewpoint, i have a little different perspective and that is how to keep people working as effectively as they can in the office. I don't know what other places did with that.
>> that's actually a really good question. And we were just having that same discussion with the parking committee yesterday. They expressed that exact same -- if i have to run out for an errand, if i have to go to a meeting, what do i do? And your department is a really good example of that.
>> we're still discussing it.
>> if i could give an example of how policy could make spaces available to address that concern. For example, hypothetical, if we had a 1,000 space garage, the recommendation would be to issue 1,200 permits. Set that aside for a minute. Our goal would be for that overissue rate to generate no more than 950 vehicles present at any given time in that 1,000 space garage. So that we always have a five percent buffer that makes spaces available for people coming back from lunch, coming back from meetings, so that there is a perception of adequate parking. So while the planning goal that we're recommending of 120% is the median of the market, professional management would let us take that 1,000 space garage and only had 800 people parked in it today, and we would sneak up on it. We would issue 100 more permits for that parking zone. And then see how that starts to fill up the garage. Then we would sneak up incrementally, issuing more and more permits until we observed about 950 spaces utilized in our thousand space asset so that we never have employees wasting time searching for parking.
>> and if you're confident of that, then your recommendation would be everyone would be treated the same, whether you're an elected official or employee, because the inconvenience of parking or not having a space really does impact everyone the same. So what your recommendation is there would always be parking spaces, so everyone should zone in or hunt and peculiar.
>> you've used the words that i've been told to use, hunting license.
>> it seems like a hunting license.
>> the zoning, you'll find, will allow a tremendous amount of flexibility. Just like a gated apartment communities and just like toll tag systems. If you register your vehicle with a transponder on the dash just like the toll tag system, we can log you into the system, we can log you into a nest within the system, we can log you out through that -- into the next nest so that we can dises i guess nate your parking area. For elected officials, if we wanted to reserve the ground floor of the san antonio parking garage, we would issue -- say there were 100 parking spaces. We would issue 105 parking spaces so there would always be an elected officials space and no one would ever have to look. But then for the areas above we might issue 125% because that's what actually achieves 95% utilization. What the toll tags do is log you into the system. It gives you a grace period to get to the next antenna that prevents you from taking the first elected space available and then lets you look for a space within your designated zone.
>> so no one would have an assigned space in your recommendation.
>> no assigned spaces would optimize your utilization.
>> and rodney, are you doing a financial analysis on the cost of the monitoring and the management as opposed to building?
>> yeah. One of the things that we're looking at is based on some of the directions that the court is being asked to provide to the broaddus team is what the cost would be to go out and construct a new facility versus do another -- to construct another facility. And i'll give you a good example. We were talking yesterday about the zoned concept utilizing the parking garage at 700 lavaca as a test case because it is a managed garage and so it makes the perfect application for testing such a concept. And so when we went back and looked at some of the costs to go through and install, for example, the necessary antennas and the cost to issue the window stickers or the decals, we're talking about costs probably no more than 20, $30,000 to install in 700 lavaca to utilize as the test case, which would be -- in theory, and we haven't looked at the revenue that the parking garage is generating right now, but in theory you would think that over a 12 month period that would pay for itself through some of the revenues that were generated from the parking garage.
>> from employees.
>> no, from visitors --
>> we already have that, though. We already have that money. It's a different issue.
>> so that is kind of a general idea of what we -- a thumbnail sketch of kind of what we talked about yesterday with the parking committee.
>> what we've discussed with the court here, especially when we are trying our best to put our arms around the quality of air emissions and stuff like that and trying to get employees to do as much as possible to use alternative methods to get to work downtown -- in fact, cat metro was even brought in during that time and other incentives that will be available to employees that have parking challenges, need to come here as far as -- as far as coming in on different modes of transportation other than single vehicle that's coming downtown. We looked at that and of course i don't know if that's being factored in. There's a lot of uneasiness with me on this. New building and all these other kinds of stuff. I'm very uneasy. Especially if there's alternatives that we can look at as far as making sure we reduce single vehicle occupancy coming downtown. We got another item on the agenda that we're looking at. And believe me, when we're talking about non-attainment and attainment as far as our vehicle emissions and ozone and all that stuff, that's real. And of course, i don't know what you're doing or what you're suggesting will impact any of this kind of stuff, which i think it should show some type of relationship.
>> it definitely does.
>> for vehicles being driven downtown as opposed to what we're trying to deal with as far as our air emissions. So all of these factors i think are very important. And of course, i really don't know where we are on that. I know we looked at it and said these are the kind of cities that we would like employees to embrace and we kind of -- i don't know where we are on that. We kind of left it alone, i guess. And it had to do with parking and encouraging folks to come down here under other -- under other transportation operations other combined operation where you have shuttles and all these other kinds of things. So this thing here -- i don't know where you're going with this, but i do know that i'm kind of uncomfortable on some of it.
>> mr. Davis, currently your employees are using alternatives about two percent, and this is also a correction to my earlier statement, commissioner eckhardt. What we're suggesting is that you actually increase your current transportation policies from two percent by another three percent alternative transportation being used --
>> you're shooting for five%. So it does speak to the continued investment in moving towards alternative transportation.
>> right, but i brought up an area and i didn't get a chance to continue in what i'm saying. I said earlier and i mentioned because the competition, whether we're looking at juries, whether we're look looking at visitors, whether we're looking at employees, the competition is there and what do we do about some of the things to address these different concerns? And i mentioned shuttles. And i don't want that bypassed.
>> absolutely.
>> i'm not comfortable with -- especially if it can save us some money. So i'm just letting you know where you're coming from. And right now i'm not too comfortable.
>> if the court says yes, these make sense for planning purposes going forward, that we would use those as assumptions as we're developing the downtown master plan. So those are directly related to alternative transportation means for both visitors, jurors and employees.
>> the confirmation or the expression of your thought that has been -- we've been working with is that we are looking to do two things for a parking situation. If we have more demand than we have spaces, we either need to reduce the demand or increase spaces. We can reduce demand by moving it off site just as you've recommended. One of the ponl synergies that would make best use of everybody's dollars is to make use of existing transit systems that are in place, better utilization that would serve remote locations. Another strategy would be to look for sinner gistic uses with churches and other places that have empty parking during the week that tend to be entertainment venues and we've got several of those in the downtown area. There's no reason that the dillo couldn't run from parmer again. So we are looking for synergies between underutilized spaces during the week and the -- our need for spaces, really extra spaces on mondays and fridays. Those are our peak days.
>> mr. Gieselman.
>> i have a question or comment. What was the assumption about the parking of the county fleet, the downtown fleet in the study, and what is your, if any, policy recommendation with regard to that?
>> there would be no fleet downtown. I'm kidding, joe.
>> [ laughter ]
>> tell my employees how to do their job.
>> [ laughter ]
>> i would welcome your correction on this. Conversations with the parking committee from yesterday, i understand that the impact of fleet vehicles is neutral on total demand during the day. That we -- if i was a travis county employee and i drove to work and had a county vehicle for my assignments during the day, i would unpark my county vehicle, park in that space, go do my job, come home at the end of the day, unpark my vehicle, park the county vehicle and go home. Just because we have a county vehicle parked downtown doesn't mean that we've lost that space for employee parking during the day.
>> not true, but -- there are assigned parking spaces for county fleet in the downtown area. Separate and aside from employee parking.
>> it will be in excess of what we allow employees to use today.
>> these are vehicles in and out all day long, inspectors, project engineers, whatnot, that are really coming to work in their private vehicle because these are not assigned vehicles and they're putting their private vehicle in an assigned place.
>> that may be part of the high vacancy rates we saw on friday and monday.
>> that may be somehow part of your assumption that those spaces really aren't there.
>> that's one thing i think you ought to take a look at that and i would be most interested in where that goes, of course. The other is i think if you really are shoot to go increase your mode split by three percent, particularly among the bicycle users, i think you really need to look at bicycle racks in those facilities as well as showers.
>> absolutely.
>> in texas, i'm sorry, you just don't bike unless you have someplace to change and without that there's no hope that you will get people in this climate to change their habit.
>> the transportation specialist indicate that had we could see three percent if we did all of the things that you recommended.
>> so from a programmatic perspective in phase one needs assessment, that was something that we were asked to include programmatically in our planning factors to accommodate showers, facilities and the different buildings downtown to help tie it back to this conversation that we knew was coming later on about alternatives.
>> it's accurate to say that the five percent maximum assumes no paid parking. It assumes that we are going forward with current policies of providing county parking. And the addition -- the opportunity to increase beyond five percent lies in the ability to charge for parking, to further incentivize. Just to put the alternatives in perspective today with 2,000 spaces in county inventory, if we had two percent ridership, we have 40 people who take alternative -- seek alternatives to bringing their own vehicle. When we go to -- today if we were to increase that to five percent, we would have -- we would have 100 people. So we would be able to get 60 more cars off of the street. The benefit as the demand grows in the future from 2,000 to 4,000 is we'll have 200 cars off the street by 2035. It seems fully reasonable to be able to double that if pricing policy could help us manage demand.
>> and i think sort of -- i want to make sure that we leave all of you with this, just like when we were talking about in phase one about assumptions for the purposes of planning, these are again assumptions for the purposes of planning about demand. But there are real assumptions that we would have to deal with in the future if we planned around all these assumptions, but the key issue, and i shared this with the parking committee when we met with them as well, is this notion of management. And i can't understate that and restate that enough is we can -- you could decide on a parking policy shift tomorrow, but when suzanne was up here and we were talking about this, the -- this is something that can be taken in bite size pieces, it can be done on pilot projects, it can be done in baby steps, and it can be overstepped. And in some cases there needs to be adjustments made to that, so there needs to be some kind of dedicated resource. And we talked about this a little bit with the planning committee, whether it relates to an f.t.e. Personnel or an outsourced contract entity. There needs to be some kind of a management resource who is so foe cause that had they wake up everyday and go to sleep every night is making sure that the parking is maximized, utilized, enforced, charged, leveraged to the fullest capacity of the county. So it's an ongoing effort that is not a matter of a policy change and then we go away. It really has to be monitor odd a real regular basis, and the technology exists to help make that a little bit easier as we've alluded to.
>> the parking committee in the consultants have tried to plan on an f.t.e. For management of the current inventory and a half f.t.e. To manage transportation alternatives to encourage and incentivize remote shuttles, managing a remote jury system, shuttle type systems, transportation management type systems.
>> is there a list of actions we'll need to take in order to increase the sov alternatives from two percent to five percent?
>> we can give you a list. We do have a detailed list of some alternatives out there that you can consider.
>> let's get that to us in the next couple of days in preparation for next tuesday. So do we have a formal response from the parking committee to these recommendations?
>> not yet.
>> can we have one by next tuesday?
>> we can find out.
>> we'll get somebody here from the parking committee. I would like no know what they think. So did we look at the -- the other communities that have this zoned parking that you mentioned, those are texas urban counties?
>> yes, sir. Tarrant, harris, dallas and bexar counties were all polled.
>> okay. So we're looking at taking action on this next week or two weeks from today?
>> if possible we would like to have action next week, judge, if you bu if we need to wait two weeks, we can certainly do that. Again, this is a component of building the overall scenariod development for the central campus, and once the court gives us direction on that, then the broaddus team can be able to go through and start building and making sure that their scenarios that they're currently working on can fit within these parameters.
>> if you came back to us and said we need to -- we need a parking garage for jury call day, so plan another parking garage of 500 spaces, that is for today, not including future projections, that's going to have a dramatic impact on our massing and stacking and blocking in the downtown area. So that is the critical aspect of the decision.
>> these are pretty big actions for three people if the vote is two-one. Then it ain't good. And for the next two weeks we'll only have three here. It's better if all three of us support a certain action, but if there's a divided vote of two-one, it doesn't bode well for the future, i think. Let's think about it.
>> okay. We'll do.
>> figure out what to do.
>> thank you very much.
>> thank you, judge.
>> thank you. Okay. Let's see if we can take two or three items that ought to be a lot faster.
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Last Modified:
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 2:35 PM
