Fill in the Bubble (7/14/10)
The city of University Park is considering three separate residential parking districts in the area surrounding SMU. Residents would be charged a flat annual fee for parking permits to park in front of their house, and guest passes would be free. Homes in the area near Highland Park High School are already regulated by a residential parking district in which permits are required for on-street parking during school hours.
I think the residential parking districts proposed by the city are (fair/unfair) because ____________.
Some people in the Park Cities pay to park a car in front of their own house? Man. I’d hate that.
Seriously? Paying to park in front of your own home? I understand homeowners in areas such as these requiring permits to avoid visitors parking, but I just assumed they were procedural, and free.
I guess they have to pay for new parks, naming, water slides somehow…
Do these other areas that are already “regulated” pay to park in front of their own homes as well?
Just plain wrong. It isn’t a problem on the east side of campus until after 6PM when residents clog Daniel and Rosedale by parking on the street. Home values will decline when potential buyers find out they have to pay to park in front of their home and run to city hall every time a visitor needs a parking pass. Address the problem with SMU administration, don’t penalize the homeowners.
@Avid Reader: As I understand it, the parking district around Highland Park High School is free of charge. It is also a lot smaller than the proposed SMU parking districts.
Tax funded streets and you pay to park there? Any parking districts around HPPC?
So I have to (1) pay to park on a street I already pay taxes to maintain, and (2) go down to city hall and pick up parking passes every time someone comes over? Will I have to beg for 20 parking passes when I have a Texas-OU or Super Bowl watching party? Unacceptable.
Why didn’t the council use its leverage with SMU during the Bush library rezoning process to force the university to provide more on-campus parking? When it approved the rezoning, the city stupidly forfeited whatever leverage it might have had on the parking issue.
Why doesn’t the council just instruct the UPPD to ticket any car parked on the street that has an SMU parking permit?
What problem are they trying to solve for? SMU students/ employees parking and clogging residential areas? If so, then why punish the victim (homeowners)? Just doesn’t make sense.
In fact, this is so ridiculous, I’m going to go ahead and assume that this is a miscommunication, and that there is no way that they are going to charge people to park in front of their own houses.
A much simpler and more efficient system than “districts” would be simply to enact a city-wide residential parking ordinance. The upshot would be that only residents and their guests can park in front of a given house–no matter where in UP that house is located.
Why do I say this? Two reasons: (1) the SMU kids will only be forced to go deeper, past the “districts,” further into neighborhoods; (2) street parking is already a huge problem in many other parts of UP, where SMU students aren’t to blame–and it’s only going to get worse (as long as people continue to build new, seven-bedroom homes, have five kids, buy them each a car, but only build a two-car garage).
Whether the city needs to charge residents for enforcement is another matter. I myself would be willing to pay for it.
The city needs to do their homework and a little night time due diligence. I live at the far end of Rosedale and I haven’t seen an SMU kid park here ever. I drive down Daniel and Rosedale to get to Snider Plaza and the worst parking on the street is after 6pm, not during the day. Am I missing something? Sounds like a tax to hire another parking scooter.
I’d pay extra for über parking in front of my house. Come to think of it, we have all been subsidizing the signs, permits and extra enforcement for the resident only zone around the high school for years. THROWDOWN: Free frozen yogurt for anyone who can demonstrate that ANY program or project undertaken in UP has caused adjacent property values to fall. Gimme MLS and DCAD numbers to prove that the Boogie Man really does exist…
Crazy. Parking is also a problem just south of Mockingbird on Sunday mornings due to HPUMC, and on Saturday afternoons in the fall due to SMU football. Are we going to make people pay to park on the streets for those events, too? C’mon.
@Pigskinnie: Good point. And it’s worth mentioning that on Sunday mornings, many people who attend HPUMC also park on Shenandoah, Normandy and Potomac, parts of which are well within the proposed parking district. Somehow I can’t picture the UPPD handing out tickets to those cars on Sunday mornings. Or, for that matter, to parents who park on Binkley or Shenandoah to attend Saturday morning soccer and lacrosse games at the middle school. This selective enforcement will generate a lot of resentment from the residents in the district who have to pay to park in front of their own houses and schlep down to city hall to get permits for their guests.