Parking Benefit Districts
San Diego, California | Population: 1,419,516 (2017)
Since the 1990s, cities across the country have adopted parking benefit district (PBD) policies. Praised by transportation experts like The High Cost of Free Parking author Donald Shoup, PBDs use parking meter revenue to fund local streetscape, transportation, and infrastructure projects. In cities without PBDs, parking meter revenue goes into a general fund or, in cities where the municipality does not manage the meters, to a third-party corporation the city sold the rights to. In cities with PBDs, however, the city splits the revenue with the community in which the meters are located.
San Diego, California, has five PBDs, known as designated community parking districts (CPD). San Diego established the Uptown Community Parking District (UCPD) in 1997, aiming to alleviate the long-term parking issue due to its location near the airport and leverage the significant parking revenue of the densely populated neighborhood toward streetscape and traffic calming.
In San Diego, parking meter revenue is split 55/45 in CPDs, and it must be spent in the same community it is generated. The UCPD then splits the revenue among its four neighborhoods based upon the percentage of total revenue each neighborhood generates.
Because the UCPD serves four distinct neighborhoods--Hillcrest, Bankers Hill, Mission Hills, and International Restaurant Row—the structure of their CPD must reflect each neighborhoods’ unique needs and priorities. The four neighborhoods each have their own UCPD board subcommittee that develops the projects and budgets, which are then presented to and approved by the full board, and the city-designated planning board.
The Uptown community on the whole is conflicted about the CPD designation. As with most parking policies, the primary disagreement is about whether the neighborhood should add more parking of focus on multimodal streetscape improvements. To better accommodate residents’ and business owners’ needs, the UCPD also organizes their subcommittees by neighborhood, rather than project type, so that the collective neighborhood can decide what projects they want in their immediate vicinity.
As UCPD’s funds are meant to be for community projects, UCPD prioritizes community engagement and communication with residents and business owners. All projects go through a thorough community review process, requiring a 51% approval to go through. The UCPD must give notice to all affected residents and business owners for streetscape changes, including simple projects like parking configuration conversions. The public is also invited to comment on any related business—listed on the agenda or not--at the beginning of every monthly neighborhood subcommittee.
The UCPD designation has led to a variety of streetscape improvements including: parallel to head-in parking, vehicular and pedestrian wayfinding, and neighborhood banners. Planned maintenance to the bike lane improvements includes: bike racks, lampposts, decorative paving, ballards, trash cans, as well as trees, flowers, and grasses.
UCPD is also working on two large multi-modal transportation projects with the City and SANDAG (San Diego Association of Governments), including a complete street conversion with pedestrian and bike safety enhancements, and new pedestrian infrastructure into the upcoming 4th and 5th Avenue SANDAG bike lanes through the Bankers Hill neighborhood.
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