Three hour parking

[somjournal.livejournal.com]

You can now park for three hours at lots in Davis Square. Weigh in on the change on our blog.

Comments

[chumbolly.livejournal.com]

Playing Devil's advocate, by increasing the allowed parking time, it could increase traffic in the Square. Here's my logic: longer parking time decreases parking space turnover, which effectively means fewer parking spaces available, which means more cars circling the Square looking for spaces, so, more traffic. Imagine there are 100 spaces in the Square, each with 6 hypothetical two hour "slots" (presuming meters are from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.). That's 600 parking slots. Increase max parking time to three hours, and each parking space has only 4 slots, for a total of 400 slots, a decrease of 50%. Of course, most people don't stay the full 2 or 3 hours, so the real decrease is much less, perhaps 10-20% (total guess).

On the otherhand, fewer available spaces could decrease traffic if people decide it's not worth it to drive to the Square because it is too hard to park, but I think it's more likely that traffic will increase.

[nalz.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, right now most weekdays/nights there are tons of spaces in the lots already - a lot of time you see people circling not because there aren't spaces, but because they don't want to pay. I really don't think this will affect anything other than people don't have to run to feed meters as much.

[dani-namaste.livejournal.com]

My thoughts exactly. Most people who actually live near the square don't drive to it - and sometimes you just want to park somewhere for a while, work on your laptop, and not have to worry about a meter. I say hooray.