DDOT Seeks Public Input on Parking....Sort of

You may have seen the press release below on any of a number of neighborhood listservs and blogs.  The DC Department of Transportation is holding what they call "a series of public meetings" to "solicit public input on the future of parking in the District" -- but as far as I see, they're talking about just two meetings -- and one of them is set for the middle of a workday at a downtown government building, this coming Tuesday. The other one will be on September 18, at 1800 Good Hope Road, SE. There's a promise of an online survey for those who can't attend meetings, but it's not available yet. I'm wondering if the turnout at the first two meetings will affect the scheduling of any subsequent meetings, or whether ideas generated at these meetings will play a role in shaping the survey. Stay tuned....

--Peggy Robin

All Life Is Local

DDOT Seeking Public Input on Parking in the District

All Who Live, Work or Visit in the District Are Encouraged to Participate

(Washington, D.C.) The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) is hosting a series of community conversations, called Parking Think Tanks, to gauge the state of parking and to solicit public input on the future of parking in the District. DDOT envisions that these conversations will contribute to the development of a comprehensive curbside parking management plan.

In the ten years since DDOT’s establishment both the District and the role of transportation have changed dramatically. The population has grown; vehicle ownership has declined; transportation options and choices have greatly expanded; and more people are taking advantage of these new options. DDOT is asking for citizen input to develop strategies and recommendations to better balance the parking needs of everyone --employees, residents, and visitors-- who competes for a share of the limited curbspace.

The goal of parking management in the District is to improve mobility and convenience by:

• Preserving access to parking in residential areas for residents;
• Promoting and facilitating commerce by prioritizing customer and commercial vehicle access in commercial areas; and
• Ensuring the safety of all transportation users including pedestrians, bicyclists, transit users, and motorists.

DDOT is seeking comments and recommendations on a number of its current parking programs such as the Residential and Visitor Permit Parking (RPP) programs, Performance Based Parking, parking meters, the management of reserved / restricted spaces (such as commercial loading, car sharing, ADA parking, etc.) and bicycle and scooter parking accommodations. Details about DDOT’s current parking programs are available online at http://ddot.dc.gov/DC/DDOT/Services/Parking+Services. In addition, DDOT is seeking suggestions for future parking enhancement opportunities

Anyone who visits, lives or works in the District is invited to attend a Parking Think Tank and/or to share their input via an online survey. The input received will help shape future parking policies and programs to create a more efficient use of parking resources.

The following Parking Think Tanks are scheduled to take place as follows:

Tuesday, August 28, 2012
2 p.m. - 4 p.m.
One Judiciary Square (Old Council Chambers)
441 4th Street, NW

Tuesday, September 18, 2012
6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Ora Glover Community Room
1800 Good Hope Road, SE

The schedule for the additional Parking Think Tanks, the online survey and the information that will be presented at these meetings will be made available online at ddot.dc.gov/ParkingThinkTanks. The same DDOT presentation will be made at each Parking Think Tank.

Following the Parking Think Tanks, DDOT will host a public summit to report on the input received from the public; how the input may potentially shape the outcome of comprehensive curbside parking management plan; and the agency’s next steps.

Questions and requests for additional information may be directed to Angelo Rao at 202-671-1370 or by email to angelo.rao @ dc.gov.

DDOT is committed to ensuring that no person is excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, its projects, programs, and services on the basis of race, color, national origin, or gender, as provided by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or on the basis of disability as provided by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

If you need special accommodations or language assistance services (translation or interpretation), please contact Angelo Rao at 202-671-1370 or  angelo.rao @ dc.gov in advance of the meeting. These services will be provided free of charge.

###

A DC Parking Ticket You Don't Have to Pay

What kind of parking ticket do you not have to pay? If that sounds like a riddle, well, it is, but it's also the truth: There are some kinds of parking tickets that you can just rip up with abandon. What tickets are those? The parking tickets issued by area universities. Here's what happened to one American University Park area resident, as reported on the Tenleytown listserv:

Today I received a $75 ticket from American University Law School for "Parking in Residential St. While Coming to WCL." I received the ticket on my car which was parked directly in front of my house, five blocks from the law school. I have no connection to Washington College of Law and have never been inside. I have parked my car in front of my house every day for over two years and never received a ticket. I walked around the area and found the ticket issuer and asked him why he had ticketed my car. He said "Well, I can't tell who's a resident and who's a student, so I ticket everyone." Sure enough, every single car in the vicinity of my house had a ticket on it. I could count at least 6 cars of my neighbors, all of whom have no connection to the law school, who had been ticketed.

A list member explained how these tickets come about:

This simply refers back to the neighborhood upset about the law school being built. AU is simply trying to follow up on some rules they apply to their students. One of these rules is that they cannot park in this neighborhood. These tickets only apply to the students and everyone else can discard them. I have received a number over the years and if you look closely the ticket will read that you can ignore it if you are not a student at AU."

American University has a web page explaining their neighborhood parking rules. If you prefer not to have that moment of anxiety when you're walking to your car and see a ticket on the window, even if it's a non-enforceable ticket, you can call American University and have your car put on the do-not-ticket list.

An interesting byproduct of the self-enforcement by American University is that it may be that DC parking officials don't ticket illegally parked cars with the same vigor as they do in other parts of the city. Reports another Tenleytown listserv member: "An MPD officer stopped to ticket a car that was parked facing the wrong way. I asked her whether she also intended to ticket the cars parked in excess of the 2-hour parking signs and she responded that 'AU handles that, they've got their own people' and that DC no longer monitored or issued tickets in that area."

When Is a Car Theft Not a Car Theft?

This story of the not-really-stolen car, reported on the listserv of the Second District Police, may be of interest to anyone who has ever forgotten just where he or she parked.

The reported stolen automobile in the 4200 block of Jennifer Street was in fact not stolen, just misplaced. The complainant in this case reported she had parked her vehicle on Jenifer Street, and upon her return, the vehicle had been taken. Officers canvassed the immediate area around the offense and were unable to locate the vehicle. Subsequently, a report was generated documenting the offense.

A short time later, the reporting officer commenced patrolling his beat when he observed the complainant's vehicle parked in the 5300 block of 43rd St. The officer notified the complainant that he had located her vehicle. Once on the scene the complainant stated that this is where she originally parked her vehicle. She relayed she was never certain of where she parked her vehicle and may have confused Jennifer St. with 43rd Street.

Case closed.

--Lieutenant John M. Hedgecock
   Metropolitan Police Department
   Second District, Patrol Service Area 206

Still Life with Robin: Meter Meditations

Don’t follow leaders/Watch the parking meters  –Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues, 1965

This may sound strange, but I’m nostalgic for parking meters. You know, the old kind that have an actual time-dial on the front and a slot for your coins. You find an unoccupied space for your car and then you go up to your meter in front and you put in your change. It’s so simple. The main downside was how often the meters were jammed or broken. In DC it’s always been a dicey proposition to park at a broken meter, even if you follow to the letter the procedure for phoning in the meter number and getting a broken-meter confirmation code: Good luck challenging that ticket if you get one. Your safest best has always been to move to another space if you can.

Now we’ve lost those silver-headed meters on poles. Instead we have tall green “pay stations.” You park, and get out of your car and wander halfway down the block looking for machine to take your money. Once you find it, you have to figure out how to pay it, get it to print out that little square of paper that shows the time by which you must vacate the space, and walk back to your car and stick that proof-of-purchase slip on your dashboard. It’s the payment part of the process that usually trips me up. Two-thirds of the time it rejects my credit card. I know my credit is good, because the stores never have any problem with the card; I guess I’m messing up one of the steps in the payment process. The pay stations don’t accept paper money, which is a shame, because it now costs two dollars to park for an hour, and I just can’t manage to maintain the quantity of quarters necessary to keep pace with my parking needs. By the way, this is not a complaint about the price of parking on our city streets: Seven and a half minutes for a quarter is pretty good buy, given that if you go into the nearest CVS with a quarter, you’d be lucky to find even a single piece of candy for that price. Most private lots in the neighborhood would run you between four and ten bucks an hour.

ROSA, RPP, Guest Passes: It's Complicated (Part I)

Where and how are your overnight guests allowed to park if you live on a street zoned for residential parking in DC? This question has been batted back and forth on the Cleveland Park Listserv recently, and the Director of the DPW has weighed in on the matter on Second District Police’s listserv. The multitude of voices, each offering his or her own reading of the parking regs, has only served to make the picture murkier. Here are some of the factors in play.

First, DC will ticket any car parked more than two hours on a zoned residential street unless that car displays an RPP (Residential Parking Permit) sticker for that zone. You can purchase an RPP sticker for your car only if you have registered your car in DC and live on a street zoned for RPP parking. So, for example, if you live in an apartment building on Connecticut Avenue, there’s no way you can get an RPP sticker, no matter where your car is registered.

Now if you do have an RPP sticker, you are also entitled to a guest parking pass to give to your visitors from out of state or from other zones in the city. You might think that this pass would allow your overnight guests to park on the street and not get a ticket. Here’s what happened to a neighbor who had a frequent overnight visitor using the guest pass on his car.

Your Own Private Street Parking

I have noticed that people are still using orange cones to reserve public parking spots in the streets (have noticed them specifically around the 3400 block of 14th St). Now I appreciate that during Snowmageddon, if you dig out a space you should reap the rewards from that effort. However, the blizzard is over and the parking reservations should have gone along with it....Is there anything we can do?

So goes a message on the Columbia Heights listserv.

Hotly debated during Snowmageddon was the question:  If you dig your car out of the snow, do you have a moral right to that space and can you "reserve" it by putting chairs, brooms, tables, cones, replicas of the Eiffel tower or other objects in the space?

There are arguments pro and con. On the one hand, it's definitely illegal to claim a public parking space as your own.  No ambiguity about that. And parking spaces belong to everyone: Parking spaces belong to the people. (OMG that sounds hokey, but it's true.)

The Eternal Illegally Parked Car

There's an illegally parked car in Georgetown that simply won't go. The story behind this car gives some insight into why illegally parked cars sometimes are just unmovable objects. This story was reported on the Georgetown listserv.

The truck has now been parked in front of our house, illegally, for at least 7 days. Unresolved...

Last Sunday we noticed a truck (expired Maryland license plates) was parked in front of our house at 1685 34th Street, NW, between R Street and Reservoir Road (not sure if it was there earlier on the weekend or not). On Wednesday it was still there. Here were my steps to try to get someone to attend to it.

Wednesday, 29 September: Phoned 2nd precinct asking how to report an illegally parked truck in front of my house. The officer (did not ask his name, unfortunately) told me they did not deal with illegally parked cars and I'd have to call DMV. He gave me the telephone number at DMV.

DDOT Considers Limiting Residential Parking to One Side of the Street

The weather and parking have much in common, but the main difference is that you can do something about parking. Sometimes. We learned from our companion listserv that DDOT is considering changes to the city's residential parking program. One of possible changes might be to limit parking to residents only on one side of the street. Here is the information that was posted today on the Cleveland Park Listserv by an ANC 3C Commissioner.

DDOT has undertaken a review of the citywide residential parking permit program. This includes the concept of resident-only parking on one side of the street. The expectation is that the review will not be completed until after the election and that a decision about implementing a pilot program specific to the area near the metro would not be made until after the new year. 

We'll update you on this when we have more information.

The Zen of a Good Parking Space

Photo by Bill Adler

A parking space on Macomb Street, NW in the District of Columbia.

Washington Tweets

Washington tweets. A lot. The Washington Tweets column is a collection of the most interesting, recent Washington-area tweets. These tweets reveal a candid and fascinating portrait of what is on our collective minds: Twitter gives a snapshot of what we're doing, thinking and hoping for as a group. Washington Tweets is Washington in the raw. Bill Adler tweets at @billadler.


off to the river with dad and bobert today! Hopefully I catch me some steelhead!

Will Vincent Gray fire even one poorly performing teacher? Will you, his supporters, hold him accountable to that?

@huthomsen good to know! Did I mention the adorable boy working in the dupont circle/Farragut north whole foods?