Tag: Ashland Oregon

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.

“You Have To Try The Water”

Posted on by Julia Havens

One of the most appealing factors that encouraged me to sign up for Community Planning Workshop was the opportunity to work with Oregon communities to help solve real problems. Therefore, having spent 3 weeks learning the details of our project, Ashland Sustainable Transportation, and the dynamic community we would be working with, my team and I were itching to get out, hit the road, and see what it is that draws those 400,000 visitors to Ashland, Oregon every year.

Ashland Sustainable Transportation Community Planning Workshop CPWOur day started out with a tour of the city of Ashland, including a drive along the city’s main streets and a walk around the downtown area (although I should not neglect to mention the great lunch we had at Ashland Food Co-op beforehand, nor the delicious natural lithia spring mineral water we all tried). We then met with Mike Faught and Bill Molnar, who work with Ashland’s Public Works and Community Development Departments, respectively, and are serving as our primary project contacts.

The highlight of our trip was getting to meet with our Project Advisory Committee (PAC) for the first time. The committee’s 23 members were handpicked by the Mayor of Ashland, and includes representatives from the Planning Commission, Transportation Commission, and local businesses.

Our main task for this meeting was to introduce the PAC to several parking management strategies that could potentially be implemented as solutions to Ashland’s transportation issues. Each of us made a poster highlighting one of the strategies, which included education, wayfinding, regulation, and transportation demand management (programs designed to get users out of single-occupancy vehicles). After splitting into five groups, the PAC members rotated through our stations, where we discussed examples of how each strategy has been successfully used in other communities, and subsequently, if there were any issues or opportunities for using them in Ashland.

Overall, I feel we got valuable feedback from this process. It is really motivating to be able to work with a group of people that are so engaged and committed to the project and the community as a whole. The committee members had a wide range of experience in working with transportation and parking matters, and were able to give us very constructive and practical insight into Ashland’s needs.

Based on how our first meeting went, I look forward to continuing to work with the PAC as our project progresses. Our next meeting is scheduled for March 5, and we have eagerly begun preparations for it. This time around, we will be presenting the results from the first round of surveys, which gathered perceptions about downtown use. With more responsibility, we are even more excited for the next meeting, as  it should turn out to be quite the learning experience!

Amada DSouza Community Planning Workshop Ashland Sustainable Transportation About the Author: Amanda D’Souza is a first year Master of Public Administration student at the University of Oregon. Calling Tucson, Arizona home, she received her undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of St. Andrews in 2010. Since then, she served a term with the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps, and spent the past two years supporting a social services nonprofit in Coos Bay, where she fell in love with the state of Oregon.