Tag: Ashland downtown parking

Team Mission: To Find Parking in Ashland

Posted on by Julia Havens

Andrew speakingCPW’s Ashland Team Facilitates Parking Management Progress 

Visiting Ashland, Oregon is such a pleasure that on Wednesday, March 5 the Community Planning Workshop’s “Ashland’s Sustainable Transportation Team” embarked on their second expedition to that magical place of joy and unity. While there, the team embraced the spoils and character that Ashland’s downtown so aptly provides, including its illustrious pizza parlors, coffee shops, and a delightful stroll along the banks of Ashland Creek. Yet, the Ashland Team was visiting with purpose. The team was on a mission to find parking.

While the team was successful in finding parking that day, the primary mission is to assist the city in ensuring that all visitors, local residents, downtown employees, and business owners will have available and convenient parking throughout the year, particularly during the summer tourist season. Although the Ashland Team was not able to see Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Richard III on this trip, these plays and others draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in this town of 20,000 residents each year. Thus, the downtown parking situation in Ashland from June through September can be more of a midsummer night’s nightmare than a dream.

How will the Ashland Team help rectify this parking predicament? By guiding the Ashland Downtown Parking Management and Circulation project through several phases of research, culminating in the development of several policy packages. This process will be conducted collaboratively with the mayoral appointed Project Advisory Committee (PAC).

The PAC is composed of knowledgeable and dedicated Ashland city staff members and residents who won’t settle for just another set of planning options that will eventually collect dust on a shelf in the city’s archives. This group is committed to this project from planning through implementation phases for the benefit of Ashland’s downtown users. The Ashland Team’s role is to support the PAC’s decision making with in-depth research and analysis, and to escort the PAC through an organized, strategic, and publicly transparent policy development process.

And that brings us back to the Ashland Team’s second voyage to Oregon’s little city with big parking problems. On that day, the team came prepared to facilitate a meeting with the PAC, and facilitate they did! The meeting was highly productive as all participants came to the table ready to evaluate the findings from the project’s first Survey (which solicited an impressive near 800 responses) and discuss revisions to a draft of Guiding Principles compiled based on the survey results and other resources.

Team Ashland headed back to Eugene that night with important new insights. First, the PAC is composed of motivated and sophisticated individuals who care deeply about making a positive impact in their community. Second, with only a month between meetings the Team has a lot of work to do: composing a second survey, formalizing the Guiding Principles, planning an on-the-ground parking and bicycle monitoring effort, and beginning to craft the project’s policy alternatives.

Stay tuned next month for a report on our parking and bicycle monitoring effort!

Andrew Dutterer Ashland Sustainable Transportation CPW Community Planning WorkshopAbout the author: Andrew Dutterer is pursuing concurrent master’s degrees in Environmental Studies and Community & Regional Planning. At heart, Andrew is a trout and steelhead fishing bum who loves to spend time on any river, but he now realizes that parking is an interesting subject as well.

Our CPW team is energized about this project!

Posted on by Julia Havens

Parking Ashland Oregon Community Planning WorkshopThis past summer I left my home state of Pennsylvania to attend the University of Oregon in pursuit of a Master’s of Community and Regional Planning (MCRP). After obtaining a B.S. in Geoscience and a B.A. in Geography, graduate school is providing me the opportunity to develop the skills and knowledge to help rural communities blend policies that help develop their economy, while simultaneously working to preserve the natural environment. I’m particularly interested in developing policies that recognize the connection of terrestrial and aquatic environments within watersheds, and how people interact and rely upon these natural systems.

With one term finished in my graduate education I am now embarking on a new project with the city of Ashland, located in Southern Oregon, through the UO’s Community Service Center. I will be working in a team with four other first year graduate students over the next six months, examining Ashland’s downtown parking management and multi modal transit strategies. As a planning student, I’m excited to apply my education and work with community leaders in identifying different policy alternatives.

Ashland is a vibrant city with just over 20,000 residents that hosts the Oregon Shakespeare Festival every summer, which draws 400,000 visitors. This poses a unique problem for parking management in the downtown area.

Our team is energized about this project and we’re eager to have the opportunity to gain professional experience in our first year of graduate school. We recognize that there are challenges associated with managing a downtown parking program. On one hand, parking is vital to downtown economies, while on the other hand automobile-dependent transportation is often subsidized by incentives such as free parking in downtown areas. Americans have become increasingly reliant on automobiles for transportation, and allowing free parking encourages people to drive to their destinations. This over reliance on the automobile has contributed to obesity, overconsumption of fossil fuels and has had a negative impact the environment.

Another reason we’re excited about this project is the opportunity to research new and innovative ways cities around the country are managing parking and look at alternative transportation options viable for Ashland. One way to manage downtown parking is to reduce the number of cars travelling there by encouraging carpooling, biking, walking and taking the bus.

Most of all, we are excited to work with such an engaged and active community that has identified issues important to them, and are eager to develop solutions. We look forward to the opportunity to suggest new parking management policies that promote multi modal transportation options as well as accommodate the residents and visitors of Ashland.

Stay tuned for more to come on this project. . . .

Eli Tome Community Planning Workshop CPW

About the Author:  Eli Tome is a first year MCRP student trying to find the time to balance a busy graduate student schedule and still have time to play in the mountains on the weekends. I also work as a Geographic Information Systems GTF for the Social Sciences Instructional Labs on campus.