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[Kit Collins]: All right. Hello, everybody. We're going to get started. Thank you all for being here. Whether you're here with us in person, in Medford Public Library, or joining us on Zoom. I'm Niska Collins. I'm the Vice President of the Medford City Council. I'm the Chair of the Finance and Programming Committee. That is the committee where all of our funding goes to the student, at the workshops, the funding meetings, and public meetings. And that's why I'm here at this table tonight. And and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and Um, as many of you know, for example, many of you know, right, we've been involved in the first part of our donation process. This year, we've been going team-by-team through a lot of parts of the city. So, most of the, most of the, parts of the, all of them have been geographically based. Different neighborhoods, different borders, different areas. Uh, we went out to Denver and talked about what these donations should look like. The topic that we are just at the very, very, very beginning of tonight is not about geography per se. It is about parking and transportation demand management strategies. We are talking about parking and other ways of managing transportation systems throughout the city are one of the things that I'm telling you has limited jurisdiction. So we also want to have a conversation with the community and then the planning committee and then the community court about Let's re-evaluate those rules as well as we've re-evaluated zoning and other geographies. We do not have a proposal for updated parking and transportation and amenity strategies. That is on purpose. We want the goals of tonight to be to define the terms that we are going to be using when we talk about parking and transportation and amenity. define which of them, or which strategies, actually are having credibility, and what stands outside of credibility, and what we found to be credible, and what we think is very relevant and very important, and we actually will continue to work with them. And make sure that as we go forward into what will be many additional public meetings about these topics that we're all new, to at least all accept using the same terms and finding the same thing.
[Alicia Hunt]: Sorry, I'm getting a report that the audio and the zoom is very bad. And so we're trying to troubleshoot that. And I just wanted to give you that heads up, because you may be asked to repeat some of this. My only thought is that I switch from the library guest network to the guest to network.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Zoom, is this sound better?
[Alicia Hunt]: I have a graduate student in the other room who can tell me if the sound is better for any reason from one voice to the other. Weird. It says, what I'm being told is that I'm coming through fine, but you weren't. So let's try it.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Yeah.
[Kit Collins]: I also, yeah, actually, I think maybe you had it too close and you actually wanted it a little bit further away. Try it. say a little further away.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Does that sound better? Give that a try and see what we get.
[Kit Collins]: OK. Sorry for the repeated test. I just want to make sure that you can hear me. Honestly, there wouldn't be a public meeting if there wasn't somebody telling you what to do. OK, I'm not going to repeat all of that, I know. I'm just going to scroll back 40 times. The goal of tonight's meeting, we're intentionally not coming in with a proposal for parking or transportation demand. The goals of tonight are to all get on the same page about what kind of ways do you know you need to participate in management that was written in our zoning code, what zoning can talk and what can't. I'm sure that we will get a lot of really doubtful questions and comments about parking and transportation that we will be able to plan as important and relevant but not specified zoning. We want to make sure that we all get on the same page about the constraints of knowing how the language will be published, and I had a conversation with a student who said that as we go forward, which are certainly many additional public meetings about that topic, that we are all needing the same name and we use the same term to the extent that we can, and just trying to start off on the same but we're the language that we're using, how the language is going to be introduced, Some strategies, some examples from neighboring communities that might be forums are discussing, but the other really important part of sourcing materials, unfortunately, is view ball. The forums are getting into the degree of needs in that infirmary setting. We would like to hear your questions, your comments, your concerns, the things that you are excited about, the things that you would never like to hear about again. This has been a collaborative process from the beginning of the term, and it's really important to us to hear what you have to say before we judge. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Director Hahn.
[Adam Hurtubise]: You go first. Obviously, so I have a theory that it's picking us up through the computer, whatever you did just. It's no longer up there. They are having trouble hearing us through the zoom. And my theory is there's no puck here like there was last time. But it says meeting owl as the mic.
[Adam Knight]: I know we're going to alternate, but I need to
[Adam Hurtubise]: speaking, they could hear me clearly through the zoom, but not when Kit was speaking.
[Adam Knight]: So unless you decide to be very close to that. Being a mic as well.
[Emily Innes]: Oh, yeah, we don't have a speaker. But it's also lost the video. That's what I'm saying. The video no longer works.
[Adam Knight]: Okay.
[Emily Innes]: And it's not green anymore. Okay, I just pushed the power button. I know because I turned it off.
[Adam Knight]: And then if I can get internet to my laptop, I can provide an audio source. Okay, so we might have a... All right, sorry to those on Zoom.
[Alicia Hunt]: Hopefully y'all can hear me. Kevin, our video guy, just returned. He had to deal with an emergency at another meeting, and he's gonna try and get some stuff updated for us, and we don't know why the Apple stopped.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Oh, I have a theory.
[Alicia Hunt]: There we go. I fixed the owl. There we go. Okay. So some of what we were saying, and hopefully you'll be able to hear as Emily and Paola speak, we are not going to repeat everything that Kit said, but we're working on a larger planning project, a larger zoning project for the city. And you're all here because we said we were going to talk about parking. And one of the things that we wanted to talk about was to hear from people first before we put a proposal out. So the intention tonight is to give you information about what the current zoning rules are, to give you definitions about what a lot of the terms that we're using and some of the definitions has to do with different tools that can be used in zoning. And then give you some frameworks to talk about to give us some input and feedback and we'll go back and forth between in the room. And I think people can tell there about 30 people on the zoom. I wanted to give use this analogy. So, when we were designing our park. We did something there where what we did was we surveyed the park and we measured the park and we said, this is how big the park is and what we have to work with. And then we went out in the park and we said to people, what would you like to see here? If this was a blank slate. And by the way, here are some types of things that one could put in a park if you'd like to see any of them. And we heard from people and we had people tell us about what they'd like to see in the park. And then we did a couple of different layouts. And we went back to the public and we said, here's here's some things based on what we heard you say. And then we heard back from them and then we designed the final thing. And so the analogy here is that what we're doing is giving you the size, like this is what's in, this is some tools, some things that could be there. And then it's like you tell us what people want to hear and see in the city of Medford. So that's some of the idea. And I'm gonna hand this over to Emily. And as I do that, I am watching to get people to tell me, again, if you're having trouble with the sound, let us know. And Christian is in the other room monitoring the sound for us as well.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you, Alicia. Again, welcome to everybody. My name is Kim Williams. I'm a nurse associate. I'm here with my colleague, Pilar Arnaz-Martinez. She will do most of the presentations at this stage, in terms of where we are in the process.
[Kit Collins]: So you need to turn on again.
[Emily Innes]: And there we go. So I keep bringing it up. This has always has been a long process with a lot of different geographic discussions. It's the first really helpful discussion. And I want to reiterate, we each have any recommendations for tonight. In terms of proposals for parking, we wanted to hear from people first. So You can go to the next slide, please. So we've been introducing everything. I'm very aggrieved. We're going to go over the process and timelines and meetings. I'm going to turn it over to Carolyn. And at the end, we mostly want to hear from you. So these are the meetings we've done since March. We've been actually working on this since last spring, a little bit before this time. This is the first way we introduce topics normally is we take it to the planning and permitting committee of the city council first. In this case, we haven't actually taken this topic to them yet. So we will do on Wednesday, we'll give them a debrief from this meeting. Then the next thing that we do is once the planning and permitting committee feel that it's in a stage at which it needs to move into the next step, They take whatever we have worked with them on, they take it to the city council city council or the community development board. So those are the dates you see there and our next meeting with them is June 18, which is next Wednesday, we'll be talking about the residential districts again and also a us. Community Development Board is the one that holds the first formal public hearings at which input is taken. The Planning and Permitting Committee is a public meeting and people are more than welcome to share any of their thoughts, concerns about the Community Development Board's formal public hearing. And next slide, please. And then finally we've had these points at which we come out and have a presentation and listening session, as we're doing tonight and this is the last one of this fiscal year, which is June 30 is on parking and information and management so welcome. Thank you for joining us. For those of you who like things in cables rather than timeline, but those are both perfectly valid ways of looking at it. 6-11 this Wednesday, we have the institutional district slash Tufts University introduction to the planning and permitting committee. We've already had a public meeting on that. parking and transportation demand management, we'll probably be talking a little bit more about the other quarters, Community Development Board on the 18th, and then possibly again on the 25th, that has not yet been confirmed. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Bella to give us that high level framework of parking now in Bedford, other communities and some definition of terms. There's a lot of information on these slides that you'll probably want to read afterwards as well and they will go up on the zoning page on the city's website after this meeting.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Can I suggest that you might want to have the mic horizontal, do you want to just have it in here and move it closer to her so she doesn't have to hold it?
[SPEAKER_14]: Can you all hear me okay? Yes? Perfect. I hope that we will get from some of their issues. Thank you very much for being here. There's a lot of people. That's great. There are some seatings in the front and some over there. So if people, you get tired, please come and sit.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: I'm going to try to do it as fast as possible, but clear as possible. Um, and I'm really sorry, but this topic is a little bit dense, so don't expect a lot of graphics and things like that. Um, I will try my best to not get you very bored. Um, so I want to make sure of what are we discussing today and what we will discuss some topics in a later moment, but not today. So we will start discussing the off-street parking requirements, and that is for private property. We won't be discussing public parking, parking standards, or curb management. And this curb management is something a little bit new that is starting, or at least certain areas is starting. And it's about the curb management, how we seek to optimize, allocate, and manage that curb space for different uses that we have of deliveries, logistics, parking, bikes. So we are getting a lot of things going on, in our cars and sidewalks. So we want to have it as neat as possible. So that would also be part of it, but not today. So parking management, I would say that parking is really essential for the transportation system. We need to take into account that a car is parked 90% of the time. It's not being used. So it's taking a lot of the space. You also need the parking where you live, where you work, where you do your entertainment. So there's a lot of spaces that should be maybe for the public that are being taken by a private property. So the parking convenience affects that we can relate to destinations and affects overall accessibility. So what we want is that parking management could have all those policies and programs that gives us more efficient use of the parking resources. So when we have this parking management that is applied properly, we know that we can significantly reduce the number of parking spaces that are required in a particular situation, providing more variety in economic, social, and environmental benefits. So parking management is about making it as efficient as possible. We are in a transition where we are shifting from an old and more conventional situation towards a new, we call it paradigm, it's a little bit fancy word, to a new way of doing things. And why we are shifting to a new paradigm is because of a lot of research in studies and a lot of analysis and information from data and statistics that are giving us this new shift. How we're doing things in a more conventional way is that we have a lot of abundant and free advertisers. Those were the goals for parking. of seeing parking after a lot of the studies and analysis and data and statistics, what is being proven to be better is for the new goal should be, is to provide optimal parking to price, supply and price, sorry. Consider too much supply as harmful as too little. Prices are too low as harmful as those that are too high. to be more in that medium area. We want to strive to use parking facility, again, efficiently as possible. Consider full lots as something to be acceptable. Emphasize sharing of parking facilities between different destinations and users. And favor to charging for parking facility cost directly to users. And here we have some comments on that, but basically that is the idea. Are we okay? Yeah. So one of the strategies that we've seen, and this is the most conventional, is to have parking minimums. That's what you would have in your current zoning. Every use is going to have a parking minimum requirement. So you have to provide those minimum parking standards so that you get your building permit. It's usually calculated by a ratio, and from that ratio, you get the number of apartments that you need. These usually reflect the maximum supply that could be needed on a BCS day anticipated. They correlate the 85% bill on the BCS. So it's calculated to have your BC day of commercial, for example, completely full or almost completely full. So that's where these minimums start, which it's not really minimums. So they are always usually going toward oversupply in many ways, derived from parking demand studies that were mostly performed in automobile dependent locations. Yeah, sorry. And then we need to understand that excessive parking requirements are waste resources. increase the money and land devoted to parking facilities and by that increasing automobile use and sprawl. So things that we don't really need. So what we're going to do now is quite fast looking at the current Medford parking requirements and then looking at other areas that are nearby and what are those requirements. So for And this depends, as I said before, by uses. And they give us the minimum use of practice. So residential uses.
[SPEAKER_14]: Yes, we're switching.
[Emily Innes]: But it gives you time to look at the slides. A little awkward I had done. There you go.
[Kevin Harrington]: Check microphone one, two. Check microphone one, two, mic one, two, check one, two, check mic one, two.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Okay. Do you want me to test or is it okay?
[Unidentified]: Okay, perfect.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: So we're back. Thank you guys for your patience. This hybrid is always a little, it has its complications. So for the residential uses, I hope you've seen, it depends on the type of residential building type that we get different parking requirements. So for single family is two parking places per dwelling unit. All other residential types are 1.5. And now we have two exceptions. So if it is affordable housing units, they can go lower to 0.5 per dwelling unit. And if it's located within a half a mile of a high frequency transit, then they can also lower to 0.8 per dwelling unit. Again, this is in your current. This is not a proposal. This is what it is. Right now, and we did a little bit of summary because every if you go to the table of uses table, a, I think it is, you will see the parking. And so you can see really for each of the uses, we didn't bring that because then we will be here forever. Office uses, they are all one per 350 square foot. You have to multiply, that's your ratio. Then for retail and services, we have different. For mainly all retail sales is one per 350. Convenience is a little bit lower demand, is one per 500. Neighborhood retail, this is very understandable. People, you expect them to walk to your neighborhood retail. That's even lower. That's one per 750. And then we have other retail uses, which is the same. You're one per 350. Now, I don't have it here by but because it's a little bit buried in your zoning from city staff. They also told and inform us that if. any use and that is non-residential is low is smaller than 5000 square foot then you don't need to provide any parking. So that's something that is again currently in your zoning and that is used as an incentivize for a small business. It's all non-residential. Yeah. So your parking requirements, now we are going to look into other communities that are around Cambridge and Somerville. They do not have any parking requirement. They delete the minimums. Then you have Everett. They do have a transportation demand management, which is quite interesting and in-depth. We will look at those in a later meeting. But right now what they have is you're going to always see residential, office, and retail. And so we have residential uses for all residential type. They don't do any distinctions. It's two per dwelling, office one per 500, so a little less than what Medford has, and retail is 300. It's a little bit higher than what Medford has. Arlington, all the residential types is one parking place per dwelling unit, that is lower than what Medford has, but without any specific reductions. Then you have for office, one per 500, less than what Medford has, and then the retail goes a little bit over 300. For Malden, we have residential uses. They do it a little bit different, not recommending this one. All residential types is one per bedroom. That is really, well, different. Office uses is higher, is one per 250, and retail as well. This is quite high, is one per 250. Looking at Newburyport, they have different for this district. So the smart growth district has residential uses. That is, it's quite interesting in the sense how they divide them. And it's that depending on the size of the residential, you get different. That's a little what Melvin tries to do, but it just gets that if you have three bedrooms or four bedrooms, single family house, it's going to be too, too high. So this is a way of dividing them more for studio, one bedroom, two dwelling, two bedroom, 1.3, three bedroom, 1.5. And then for retail and restaurants is less than what we've seen in the other communities, one per seat, six seats of occupancy. So this is a little bit different instead of by square footage is by users and the outdoor cafe they do the same, and then all the other uses is two per 1000 square foot so one per 500. So as you can see, everyone does a little bit different. Some of them are similar. And what we want to see is what parking strategies are out there. And there are a lot. So we can do, for example, update parking minimums. We have those ratios that are quite high. We can do some studies and try to lower those parking minimums. We will see a little bit more in depth. Then increased capacity of parking facilities, maximum parking ratios, residential requirements, we will see what that means. Then we have reductions. So all the different reductions that can be applied to parking requirements and that is for example proximity to public transport, affordable housing, additional bicycle parking, shared car service, mobility as a service, and dual use. I will explain all of this. Then we have also, if we provide alternative parking facilities, if we have a transport demand management, that's another one that we can do. And finally, eliminate, delete parking minimums. So we're going to look a little bit on how those, I want them to, we wanted to divide them in easy way to to structure this. So there are some things that we can do in the short term that do not need a lot of study behind them, and we will understand this a little bit better later, that can be done almost immediately. And there are others that are going to need a little bit of more time. We could implement now, but results are going to be more in the longer term. So we have short-term changes. We can have update parking minimums, increased capacity of parking facilities. I will explain. Well, let's see, like this. maximum parking ratios and residential requirements. So what is this? So update parking minimums, it doesn't mean that we erase them. We just see based on studies that actually measure the supply and the demand, the real demand for parking, so that we know what is the optimal requirement, right? So there is, and this is on the, I'm not going to get in there. This is in the presentation so you could look at this. There is a Metro Boston perfect fit parking initiative. Medford is not really in it. It's really the ones beside them, but you can see the real demand that are usually more around 0.5, 1.5 per dwelling unit. More or less depending on where you are, those will be the real demands. So if you get into this website, you can see that all the different multifamily buildings, they have what is the actual real demand. And so what you can do is after that study, we update your parking minimums according to real demands. Another thing that we can do in the short term is increase capacity of parking facilities. What that is, does it mean is mainly your size for parking place, your dimensions are for quite big cars are not done for compact vehicles. In city areas, we will use a lot more, and because they have a better use of the gas, they are more efficient, more sustainable, we tend to use more and more compact vehicles, and so they we would like to increase that demand for compact vehicles. So to add a minimum of compact vehicles so that the space can be more efficient. So right now Medford has in their current zoning that up to 30 can be designed for compact cars. For example, Cambridge has that up to 50 can be designated for compact cars, and some have a minimum, which is around 20 and 30 to be compact cars. So we really start reducing that space that is taken by parking when it's not really needed. Another strategies that can be applied in the short term is maximum parking ratio. So we know that there are minimum, what if we do maximums? So that we limit the construction of parking lots that are really not necessary and reducing that oversupply. This happens in Boston, for example, they do have those maximum parkings. Some of them do not have the minimum and only have maximums, and some of them have minimums and maximums. So we are really making sure that is not an oversupply of parking, or just that there is a lot of space that is not having any designation. Then we have parking ratios specific to residential types and this is basically what new report does. And if you have, instead of being for the type of dwelling, to have it by size, so that if it's a studio or a one bedroom, you can actually have less minimum requirements than if it's a five bedroom. So by that size, we can actually be more specific on the building type for the parking requirement. So those are all the short ones. Let's go for a little bit of those midterm, and that is reductions in parking requirements. You will see them in both because some of those reductions can actually be done as a short. Okay. Oh, it's gone. Thank you. So we will look into all those reduction of parking requirements and then what does it mean that alternative parking facilities So reduction for parking, what we want is to reduce those parking minimums whenever the development will meet certain requirements. So what we do here is to make instead of more citywide, what we do is more site specific. So, for example, if you are near to a public transport stop and we can define what does it mean if it's only high transit, if we have different percentages, if we are near a bus or near high transit, high frequency transit. Um, so in this case, Medford only applies this to the residential use, so they require that 0.8 per dwelling unit that we talked about when he's in proximity to that high frequency transit. We could do this for any kind of use. So you calculate all your minimums. If it's a mixed use, it will be residential plus the commercial. And then what we can do is having a percentage that can be reduced. And so, for example, 30% of all the parking requirements, if you live near a half a mile of high-frequency transit, can be reduced, and those 30 are taken out for all of the different uses, not only for residential. We also have affordable housing. Medford has a reduction from 1.5 to 0.5. What I really want to address here is that affordable housing, usually lower income families, medium income families, are more dependent on cars. So this is not really fair. We do this because then the cost of the building and the development is less, but we are affecting somehow those families, because usually if you are a high income, you can choose where you live, and usually you can choose that close to your work. If we provide additional bicycle parking, you could have certain reduce, you can have certain reduction. If we provide car sharing service, and usually we would recommend to be at least for a 10-year contract, this is, sorry. Do you hear me in here in the room? Yeah, okay, perfect. It's the Zoom, yeah, I know, but I also want to make sure. We are getting there. So if we have a car sharing service, and this is that there is available in-house or nearby some kind of car sharing, then you could reduce those requirements. Car sharing is a service that allow users by membership to rent cars for very long, sorry, for very short periods of time and you didn't have to worry about hours or pick out locations. And Mobility as a Service, this is actually very new. It's a new approach for urban transportation and what it does is having all of this in one app So this is really for very big developments where they can provide an app and you can have your car sharing, you can have bikes, you can have transit memberships, and from your app, you can do all of it. So it really, what it does is give that option so that personal vehicle, it's less required. And then we have another one that is this dual use. Basically, and I hope it's easy to understand, otherwise I have a lot of information. If there's any question about any of this, I just want to go fast. But the dual use is mainly, it's only for mixed use buildings. And if you have different uses, what you would do is in the same building, share those parking places because with the uses that share different peak demands. So for example, Residential and office usually works very well because when you're at the office, you usually do not use your residential parking. So usually you could reduce in a mixed use building those not entirely, but that you could share some of those. Alternative parking facilities, this is basically that you have a contract with a garage, a parking facility, private, public, that you provide your requirements. uh, in another facility. So this is not a reduction because it's not reducing anything is that you just, um, gather your, um, provide your requirements with a walking distance, um, in other facility. Yes, so alternative parking facility is that you provide those requirements in a different parking garage than your development. So you're not doing it in-house, if you're externalizing, can you say externalizing that? Okay, off-site. To another garage, but we need to make sure that it's in a walking distance. So long-term strategies, we have the transport demand management. This is very complex. We are not really going in deep or in detail. We're just going to define it, and we will present a lot more information in the next meetings. And then we have the eliminating parking minimums. So transportation demand management, what it does is give Yes, okay. It's to provide a menu of programs and policies that will aim to expand those mobility options and will support active mobility, riding transit, and using alternative work schedules while decreasing reliance on needing to drive alone. So this is to say, basically, that what certain, and this is only target to certain developments, it's not for everyone, is usually when they hit a certain threshold of intensity parking. And there are many ways to go into a demand management. But it's mainly to say, we have a lot of parking, can we, in a way, do certain policies to provide the community with other alternatives. So an example would be I am an office building and the owner will give the employees transit passes for free so that they can use it. So incentivizing all kinds of active mobility or non-drive alone option. And then we have the last one, which is eliminate minimum parking requirements. Why is it in the long term strategies is because to apply this citywide, what we need is to make sure that we provide everyone the property transit options. So if we have public transit that connects to the usual job and living areas. If we have good bike system, if we have good pedestrian network, then at a certain point, you could eliminate citywide those minimum requirements. Otherwise, it's not really recommended. Um. So this is very quickly. Why are we looking into this into parking regulations? We have a lot of information about this. If anyone is interested, we will post a lot of studies that have been published by transportation agency agencies. Um and but so we're going to give only the main topics. We're doing this because we want your community input. That's one. We do this because of climate resiliency. We do this because of public health. And we do this because of efficient land use. And yeah, yeah.
[Emily Innes]: And just as we transfer over to hearing from you instead of us recording in progress. the geographic areas for the zoning. We have heard a lot of questions, concerns, thoughts, goals, desires on parking and it just made sense to give you an overview of the terminology, an overview of some of the options, and then hear your thoughts. So we are at that point where we want to hear your thoughts. I'm going to turn it over to Alicia. to moderate because we are going to be doing what we've done in the past with hybrid meetings, which is switch between people in the room and people, people in this physical room, I should say, and people who are in the virtual room. So Alicia, turning it back to you.
[Alicia Hunt]: Okay, great and so really the idea here tonight is to hear people's thoughts and their concerns about zoning and parking. So we will ask people to use the mics so that people can hear you on the zoom. So, if people want to say something, if you can raise your hand and either going to let me out, or you're going to have to run around with the Mike. All right, we're going to let Councilor Collins run around with the Mike.
[Kit Collins]: Okay, we'll go you in the back and then we'll work our way forward.
[SPEAKER_05]: Mine's more of a clarification. this, what we're looking at now, is this for new construction or existing dwellings coming into the town, which was not clarified at the beginning at all?
[Emily Innes]: Okay, I can, I will answer that. So we are talking about zoning and what zoning does is it's when there's a change to a property. So it's this isn't retroactive. It's if somebody is going to redevelop their property, then that's when these would come into place. Okay, thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: I would just add on that it's new, or if, say, you have a building, but you want to expand that building or do a major change to that building. But nobody has to do anything if they weren't otherwise doing it correct.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes. So another silly question is, how do you have a 0.5 vehicle in a dwelling or a 0.8? Right. So those... Every dwelling has at least one car.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. So that's intended for dwellings that are more than single family. And so you would round up. So today we allow 1.5 for a multi-dwelling. So if you have a two-family house, 1.5 per dwelling means, I'm not doing math, you have to have three parking spots. But like that, and if it was close to transit and was 0.8, it would round up to one. If it was a single family, although single family is still two, it would round up to two spots for the two units. But where it really comes into play is when you have a 200 unit building, then the 0.8 is a big deal. 0.8 is very different from one when it's a 200 unit building. All right, Kit's going to man. And then after this, we now have two hands on the Zoom. So why don't we start with the one in the room?
[John Anderson]: I'm John Anderson, 102 Brooks Street. I'd like to question the assumption that higher income families are less car dependent and less affluent. Part of my reason for questioning that is I don't remember whether it was in the Medford housing production plan with a comprehensive plan, but there was a statistic that 68% of the people who worked outside of the city got to work by car, usually alone. And that also reflects my personal experience. My wife and I lived in Medford for 25 years, and we both worked. And I alone, once for two and a half years, had the opportunity to use public transportation. because we mostly worked in suburbs on 128 or 495. So we were absolutely dependent on cars. There was just no option. And also, I know on my street, very few people use public transportation. They're mostly professional, and professional folks have that same challenge. And the idea that we can move to be closer to work doesn't really fit well with people who have children in the schools or want to develop a sense of community and put in roots in the community. And just because, you know, I don't work for Wang any longer and I work for digital, I'm going to pack up and move. I don't think that's something most people want to do.
[Emily Innes]: So to your point, everybody, each person has their own individual experience of how they move through their day. Statistically, those with lower incomes tend to have fewer choices on a number of levels. And one of those is transit. I remember working in a city in Connecticut at the very beginning of my planning career. And it was a place that had excellent commuter rail access. And there was a housing authority development right next to it and the city planner at the time told me, most of the people who lived in the housing authority wouldn't take the train because none of their jobs were on the train and so they actually had a higher requirement. Your, your job was not on a train and I think we're, we've all been familiar with the fact that Boston has a hub and spoke system for our region which does make public transit harder for almost everybody, but if you look nationwide, statistically, the, there's more choice for people who have higher incomes the information that we were pulling shows the impact of those choices. So that's why we said that. However, there are also areas within Medford, clearly from the work that we've done, from what we've heard from people that have better access to transit and those areas in Medford that do not have good access to transit. And that's what we're trying to hear today is get a sense from everybody in the room. And thank you for your comments, because your experience is important for us to hear. So we appreciate it. You wanted to go into the room next?
[Danielle Evans]: And also another reason why low-income folks tend to be more dependent on cars is because they often have shift works. They're not working that 9 to 5 schedule, because that's when the peak hours for the buses and trains are. Like, tomorrow morning, I need to go downtown for a meeting, and there's plenty of buses that will get me down there for 9 a.m. and back by the end of business. But if I was trying to come back, I was working in a restaurant. And when I was in grad school, I did work in restaurants downtown. And I remember missing the last train and basically crying because all my money and tips was going to go to that taxi ride back to Somerville, Medford area. So that's just another reason why there's more car dependency.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: We do have the studies and the graphs, so we will show them in later moments. But yes, also, they tend to work multiple jobs that are in different areas, not really near one area. So.
[Emily Innes]: OK, so we are ready for the first person coming in from Zoom.
[Alicia Hunt]: And we're just going to make sure that we Do things correctly here, so I'm going to unmute her because I also have to mute myself at the same time for this to work. Hey, Cheryl, we're going to unmute you.
[Cheryl Rodriguez]: Hi, can you hear me? Okay, so Cheryl Rodriguez 21 Park Street. I've just checked with the assessor this week and we have 42,246 cars registered in the city with only 24,572 households. So that means for every adult living in the city, 81% of them own a car. One car. And I'm concerned that now that the tough students are gone, that if we start doing parking studies, we're going to miss thousands of cars. I know the students that live next door to me have six cars. If they're all gone when you do the parking study, then you're going to miss those cars. And it's even worse in South Medford. So I'm concerned about that. I'm also concerned about the fact that not all the streets are equal. If you go to the proposed NR1 neighborhoods, what they have in common is that the majority of them don't have any cars parked on the street. But if you go to the NR3s and the UR1s and UR2s, you'll see that there's cars lining both sides of those streets. So yeah, it's definitely not one size fits all. And I'm concerned that we're trying to fit a round peg in a square hole and that it's really not going to work out for us because we're not even going to get accurate car counts from the start. Thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: Thank you, Cheryl. And I think that I may, I'm just checking with Emily if she wants to clarify, but when we talk about studying parking, we're not talking about car counts on the streets. We're not going out and counting the cars. We are looking at other communities and what programs are working elsewhere and looking at some more big picture things, but we don't have, it's not actually, you're right, it's not a good use to actually go out and count cars on the street.
[Cheryl Rodriguez]: No, I'm very concerned that you're going to lose a lot of strategies because if you look at a city that doesn't have a large.
[Alicia Hunt]: Okay.
[Courtney Botelho]: Hi, my name is Courtney, but hello. I'm at forty nine Edwards street. I know there's gonna be a lot of conflicting interests kind of going on tonight, but I'm just here to talk on behalf of stormwater considerations. I'm a stormwater engineer and training and but I'm just speaking as somebody who lives in Medford. I would just highly encourage all of this to consider the stormwater implications of mandates related to park minimums. Especially as new permits are coming out from EPA. So stormwater runoff quality is a known problem for Medford. I'm in a hill. I've had like a flooded basement before. I'm sure other people have experienced those kinds of issues. But we know those are going to get worse with climate change. And that's a concern for the city based off of the climate change assessment. Based on that assessment, they've acknowledged that the system was older and undersized, which is consistent with what I've seen in other cities. Any increase in impervious surfaces is making that worse. So anything we can do to reduce the impervious surfaces in the city is probably going to be beneficial. I know, again, there's a lot of other issues here, but that's just something I would consider. The other thing is that these new permits are going to be a pretty significant cost burden on the city. In order to reduce the amount of phosphorus going into the Mystic River, the TMDL is going to be implemented based on the new EPA permit. And the estimate within the actual TMDL was a $20 to $100 million cost for the city of Medford based on the 2019 estimates. So I would just say that as we continue doing this, we should keep in mind these stormwater costs.
[Alicia Hunt]: Great, thank you. And yes, it's a helpful comment. So now let's go to one online, and then we'll go to one in the room. So the next person online is Zachary Chertog. I'm going to ask you to unmute after I mute myself.
[Zachary Chertok]: Can you hear me? well, I lit up green, so I'm going to assume so. Zachary Chartok at 5 Almond Street. So my question is that when there's a contention that the city has more parking than uses, is the data that you're looking at shows that that contention is evenly distributed across the city? Because as is often the case, uneven distribution often gets mismatched to actual local demand on the ground. So when the data is looked at from the top down, it looks like there's more than is needed, especially with when you don't have historical design uniformity. And are zoning uniformity that's implemented those parking allotments over time. So, before I add the comment to that, I'm just curious when the city and the consultants are commenting on that. Have you looked at the how well the current supply is aligning to the current demand?
[Alicia Hunt]: I want to make sure. Okay, sorry, I was waiting for the thumbs up here. I want to make sure that we're sort of talking about the same things like it's easy for us to look at supply and demand for large apartment buildings. And I know that I got that data about a year ago when we were doing the some large apartment building permitting in city of Medford. And I said, let's go find out what the other large apartment buildings in the city are actually using as like the actual usage in those buildings for ratios. And so that's easy to kind of get. I think what's really of concern to a lot of people is what about the one to 10 unit buildings? And that's where and so I don't want to say trust the professionals, but when you are talking about 200 units, there's laws of averages. You can go look at the other 200 unit buildings, see how much parking they're actually using historically, how much parking they're using. And you can make a rational decision about the new 200 or 250 unit building that is coming in. The hard part and the important part for zoning is really when we're looking at these 1 to 10 unit, 1 to 20 unit buildings where you're not going to have laws of averages. You're going to have actual people living in that building in an actual location, and their behavior is going to be different if they're near a green line stop. If they're near the orange line stop but can't get there because they have to cross Route 16, or if they're up in West Medford or North Medford. Then we're saying, well, what about two and three bedroom units? What about some small multifamily four-bedroom? When you have one parking spot per unit, you can allow a certain amount of stuff on that site. When you require two spots per unit, which by the way, was actually the rule in Medford until 2021 when it was changed in the recodifications it really decreases the amount of units like that you can fit because now every unit has to also have two parking spots that you can access independently from each other versus like is one enough or is one and a half the right number because in a three unit building do you really think that every single like all say there are six adults in a three unit building, all six are each going to have their own car? Or do you think that some will and some won't? And does it depend on where in Medford they are? So I think it's really helpful for us to hear from residents about your experiences in different parts of Medford. And I mean, I'll just share that like in my neighborhood, you can't get around without a car for every adult. My neighbor has five cars. But there are other parts of the city where I know that there are residents in Medford who are living car-free very happily, and there are residents who are trying very hard for families with children to get around with one car, and the other parent uses a cargo bike and bikes the kid around. We know these things are happening. The question is, what are the rules we should put in place? I think Zachary wasn't actually finished, but I'm going to give this back to Emily to say something.
[Emily Innes]: I just wanted to add something for Zachary, which is, like all consultants, we have a scope of what we need to address. But one of the things we wanted to do was hear the questions and concerns tonight. And that would let us know what areas we need to do a deeper dive on. So we've already been doing a lot of research, but it made sense to listen here first and find out what questions people had. So the more questions we're hearing, the better for our sense of what we need to do next. Give it back.
[Alicia Hunt]: So let's just go, Zachary, did you have something more you wanted to add? And I'll mute myself.
[Zachary Chertok]: And I'll make it quick. And Alicia, thank you for the clarification there. So leaning into a couple of things and sort of feeding off the comment about the tough students as well. So first, echoing the commuter issue, my offices personally have never been located in a direction that public transit goes in, or even in a location that often is accessible by it. So I've had a very similar experience to the gentleman that spoke before. I've always had to commute out to I-95 or 128, which is where, if you're in engineering and or tech, that's where most of your work is. And that's true for a lot of folks in Medford's tax bracket. I've tried non-car options. They just were not timely or cost viable. And in addition to that, I'm someone who requires access to facilities like hospitals and specialty facilities that just aren't accessible by transit, including anything in the Leahy Health System. um yeah yep i'm younger but i have to face that i deal with a condition that i have to get taken care about that way um somewhat of as a trade-off that i'm kind of excited to explore though is that for example you know is that is exploring combinations of these methods in each neighborhood i live in east medford you know over near glenwood on the north side of salem street and You know, I, I will admit that we've got narrow streets that have parking on both sides. It's tricky. But, for example, if the lot on Lambert street were to convert to a garage. When my partner commutes here, because he has no other way to get here other than to drive. We often use my car. Most of the time, his car sits street side. If I could put his car in a garage and get that off the street. And maybe my street goes down to one side of the street parking. That's a great combination solution for something like that. And then to free up those spaces for the people who actually need to park their cars here, because they don't have any other option. So, I like the fact that we're exploring combination solutions, but I would still err on the side of caution when fully eliminating minimums based on the fact that we are. In an interstitial and transitory zone here, where you've got people commuting in both ways and the T just cannot be relied on to change its network even in a 30 year time frame cost wise. To meet by directional demands between 128 and downtown Boston. Thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: Great, thank you. And Paula wants to add something before we go to the next in the room and.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: So the idea, and it's exactly what you said, is to create a menu where we can have different options, to create a lot of options, depending on, and make it more geographically specific. One of those would be that alternative parking facilities, or yeah, depending on where you are. Other thing that is very interesting and it might be for all those businesses is the TDM, so the transportation demand management, where the same employers could have a shuttle alternative so that there is more crossing between not only going to Boston because everything is very centralized into Boston, but people that work in Cambridge and Somerville, Arlington, so that those shuttles could be. The idea is to have a transportation demand association where a lot of those employers, business owners, et cetera, could bring other alternatives shuttle and do new transit ways instead of waiting for Massachusetts State Transportation to bring those in. That can be very interesting.
[Kit Collins]: We're going to get this gentleman over here and then we're going to go back over to that side.
[Paul Morgan]: I'm Paul Morgan. I live on Brewster road. I'd like to make some observations about parking in existing neighborhoods and how it's going to be possibly affected by some of this. Some of this development. It's pretty easy to see by walking through neighborhoods that some neighborhoods, the on-street parking is almost all gone. So they don't, whatever they have, they don't have off-street parking that's ample now. So people don't necessarily park in front of their house, and maybe sometimes they come home from work and they have to park a block away. I don't know. It certainly could happen. I think that we should change the minimum requirement for new development back to 2 units to 2 spaces per unit. Like, ever it has and, like, we just found out Medford used to have. Because otherwise you're going to impact these other existing neighborhoods of. single-family and two-family homes by putting more street parking in the area. Those people who are living in a building with one per unit and somebody wants to get a second car, they're going to be driving around the neighborhood taking up the existing parking spaces. I think the developers should pay for the cost of additional parking on their property because they're the ones making all the money and selling these brand new dwellings. And it shouldn't be put on the existing neighbors who are already here and already established. So I think that's pretty much what I want to say. And well, what I want to say is that situation isn't fair in my mind. for somebody to come in, make a lot of money, go away, and then leave the rest of the neighborhood's inconvenience for the rest of their lives here. Thank you.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you very much. We appreciate your comments.
[Alicia Hunt]: We have several hands in the room and then we'll get to one online.
[Harrison Green]: Hi, Harrison Green to Ronaleigh Road. I have a comment on the concept, as I understand it, of induced demand on parking. And can any of you up front talk about what that means in terms of the city and parking? Induce demand, meaning if we don't know the term, if we have more, our understanding now of highway design, for example, is that if we put more lanes, more traffic comes so that in the same way, I would expect that if we were to build more parking, we would get more cars. That's the product of of that decision. So we can make that decision, but we should expect that we will get more gridlock that we will have more people making that. societally easier decision to drive because of public transit not being exactly what we want it to be. But I have another comment on that.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Yes, if I find where we are. Yes. So this is very complex. Could we see it maybe? So this is the cycle of automobile dependency. It's also called induced demand. Basically, what we know for how we have been dealing conventionally with parking and with traffic and congestions, et cetera, it's that we find always that we come back to the same place. So we add lanes, people start to buy more cars, use more cars, and before it's even paid, the new investment, we are already in the same point. So that is called this, there is also called some kind of It's called a paradox. I think it's paradox of race, if I remember correctly. But yes, we are looking into this. Obviously, that's why we have all the reductions. We do not think that Medford is ready for eliminating all the parking minimums in citywide. that's something that I and there are going to be a lot of urban planners that might defend that. I don't think that Medford is ready for that but I do think that there is a lot to do with the reductions so that we can really support the real demand of what the city has instead of really going over We need to look into this also goes into air pollution, into water pollution, into a lot of other costs that taxpayers, non-users of cars are also going to be paying and that are a lot more costly than if we look into doing things properly in the first place. So, yes, we are aware of this. Um, we do have a lot of, as I said, a lot of studies that have been done. This comes from this comes from, for example. The Institute for transportation and development policy. These are really things that. Transportation agencies are telling us, um, so we are looking into those and yeah.
[Emily Innes]: And I'll add because I know you have a follow up that unfortunately when you get to something like the sort of the higher levels of automobile policy, it is of course not on Medford alone right as you know we're in a region and the region is having some of that demand in there so yeah, this, this looking into what current best practices are from transportation. agencies is one of the things we're doing to try and understand what the impact on Medford would be. So I don't want to stop you from your next question.
[Harrison Green]: Thanks. So I'm hearing in the strategies, the short, medium and long term, that there's that these are things that could be done by the developer and not by the city or not at this time, because we can spend as much time as we have to make increasingly productive tweaks to the system, or to the general rules. We can make smaller and smaller districts that have tighter and tighter or stranger guidelines to capture whatever is happening in that neighborhood. Could this not be done by the developer in the time when that change is being made? And how has that change been adopted or what's the product of that change where it has been adopted?
[Emily Innes]: So that's a great question. One of the things that we were all talking about in our check-in and our prep for this meeting is the idea of a menu of choices. That menu of choices may be based on the use type, it may be based on the development size, it may be based on the neighborhood characteristics, which could be proximity to transit or lack of proximity to transit. And then the idea is after hearing the comments tonight. The next stage is delving further into what other communities have been doing and where they've been successful and where they haven't and what those lessons are, but it would be the developer right is what we're trying to do with the zoning is set. the rules, the guidelines, the options, and then the developer comes forward and when they make their application to the city, they're saying, these are the menu choices I have chosen based on what was available to me and so that is part of that. And as you say that can be tweaked over time. You know I remember what 10 years ago they started talking about how we were going to have autonomous vehicles definitely by this time and we're all going to have parking lots around the edge of the city. That clearly hasn't happened yet. So this is something that has been a moving target for both cities and planners for a while now. That's not going to change. So making it flexible enough is important. Very quick because we've got a line off.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Oh, yeah. Another thing is that the reductions can be some. So, it's not that you choose 1 reduction or the other is that some of them can be subsequently applied.
[Alicia Hunt]: So, we go to somebody we have a couple hands online. Okay, so we're going to go to page online after I mute myself. I'm going to hit unmute on you.
[hLm7uOhMYTQ_SPEAKER_28]: Hi there, Paige Baldini. Thanks for everybody being here. 37 Winter Street and my business, Paige Aesthetics, is 319 Boston Ave. I support zoning reform, but want to make sure we get it right. Somerville took about seven years to finish theirs, which is way too long. But how can we ensure Medford's process is thorough, fair, and includes everyone, but doesn't seem rushed for important decisions. About 70% of my clients come from outside of Medford and they drive here. How can we protect parking for local businesses so they can keep serving customers who support our community? Both of my parents were stroke survivors and accessible parking meant the difference between being able to participate in their community or not. How will the new zoning plan ensure accessible parking for those of all abilities? Finally, how will the city keep everyone informed and involved so that no one is left out of these conversations? This zoning reform affects every resident and business owner. Thank you so much.
[Emily Innes]: Sure. Paige, first of all, thank you for your comments on both accessibility for small businesses and accessibility for people who may not be able to walk long distances for whatever reason. There's a whole host of why people have had illnesses, strokes, as you've said, people with young children, people who have broken their legs, a temporary thing. But all of it important so I think, you know, as we look at parking as we've discussed it internally there's basically a couple of different levels, Paula mentioned that it was complex earlier and she's absolutely right. Some of this, we can do through zoning. Some of the requirements. some of this is a city level right it's what are the city's policies for public parking whether it's on street or a parking garage and then that is not being dealt with by zoning. Paola also mentioned curb management earlier and some of that has been maybe those are spaces for people who need to be able to have direct access somebody who is wheelchair bound or whatever. So thank you for your comments. I think we will take those into account as we go forward. They're very important. I'm going to turn it over, Alicia, for how the communication is being done from the city level. So the different strategies. Sorry, Alicia.
[Alicia Hunt]: I mean, I could tell you, but it's a little bit more for you. You're turning it over to me because I'm on the Traffic Commission. And one of the things that I was going to mention is that there is an option, and people actually request this every month, that if you have a reason to have a handicapped parking spot near your home, you can actually request that. And the traffic commission will take into account, are there other handicapped spots on your street, we will assure you that this will not be a private parking spot that this is for anybody who has a valid handicap placard. And in fact you must have the valid handicap placard in order to use it, but that the city has been. adding handicapped parking spots all over the community. And when you see those, the reason they're there is because somebody has specifically requested it for that location. Sometimes when that person moves, the neighbors may say, you know what, we'd really like this spot returned to the rest of us now because there's no longer a need on this block. And with that, when we're alerted to that, then the actually the police and the city manages the traffic commission through our police department. So one of the traffic officers will confirm that it's no longer, there's no longer a valid reason to have it at that location, that that resident is no longer there. And then we'll vote to remove that sign. So I just want people to know that that's an option. We've been working on trying to do communications through a number of different ways through social media, which is really one of our easier ways to get out to people some people the mayor has been doing robo calls, if anybody doesn't know what I mean by that. Then you may not be signed up for the city's emergency alert system. So the mayor does do remote calls, or you can get it via text or email on average weekly. And she has been starting to do some specifically about the zoning as well. If you aren't signed up for those, I strongly recommend them because. If we ever had an emergency, like a boil water emergency, that's what we would use to reach you. So there's that. We try to get it out to the public through other media. We've technically done press releases and sent it to the press. A shout out to God & No Medford, who is an up-and-coming press outlet here in the city. But again, it is online only. But they have actually sent reporters to some of our events, and they often will have a reporter on these calls as well. Um, so there is some attempts. It's really hard to get the word out, especially because these things are happening somewhat quickly. So next I'll just do a quick add again next week on the 18th. The community development board is taking up. the residential zoning again. We couldn't do advanced noticing about that because they only voted last week to take it up on the 18th. So we tend to only have about two weeks notice. And then on the 25th of June, they will be taking up the Medford squares as well. In the community development board, I think I hit that. I want to keep us moving because it is 755 if I can just communications piece.
[Kit Collins]: If there's anybody in the world who hasn't already heard me plug Medford dot org slash zoning. We collaboratively work very hard to make sure that all upcoming voting meetings are at the top of that page. So, if you're interested in this topic. Please bookmark it and please help us get the word out, which we are doing through every mechanism available to us to make sure that your neighbors know about these meetings as well.
[Alicia Hunt]: We have found that the most effective way to get the word out is for people to tell their neighbors because they see it on Facebook or they see it somewhere and they just in one ear out the other. And when their neighbor talks to them, then they start paying attention. So we're actually asking people to tell their neighbors about it because that is in fact the best way to get the word out. So we have four hands online. So let me go to, are we back? We just did online. So we'll do one in the room and then we'll go to one online. Oh, we have a lot of hands in the room too. Okay.
[Erika DeRoche]: Hi, Erica DeRoche, 260 Willis Ave. I just wanted to start by saying thank you for bringing all the nuance of TDM to this conversation and talking about the different, the short, medium, long term strategies, I think that's really helpful for those of us who aren't well versed in it. I'm particularly interested in the strategies related to incentivizing reduction of parking. I'm also wanted to pick up something that Alicia said earlier about that smaller scale development, or I would even say owners. What are the incentives for small-scale developers and for owners of property, particularly property that has residential use on it? to decrease the amount of parking on those lots? What are some of those strategies? Because with smaller scale development, that ends up being a lot of curb cuts and a lot of energy and space and expense that we pay for as a city, but towards parking. Thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: So I will say, I'm going to say off the top that I'm not an expert on this. But when you mentioned curb cuts, one of the things that I think would be helpful in a big picture way to get feedback from residents is in, it used to be 50 years ago common to do shared driveways. And then people don't like sharing. They don't like talking to their neighbors. They don't like doing that. But if it's a shared driveway to like parking in the back, how does this work? You park on this side, I park on that side. That's not actually currently allowed under current Medford zoning, but shared driveways means fewer curb cuts. So maybe it's not such a bad idea after all. And maybe being forced to talk to your neighbors isn't horrible. Sorry, my brain just went to several different places there. The other thing is that we did have some issues where we were having developers who were flipping houses, paving over the entire backyard. And that is no longer allowed. And so we did actually put into our zoning parking maximums. So like for a single family home, you're only allowed to have 200%. So that means for two, You can't have more than four parking spots in your single family. Now, that doesn't count the driveway, right? So you're not allowed to have front yard parking. So your driveway doesn't count as spots. The garage does. But then if you pave over your back yard, now how many parking spots did you just put back there? Six, eight? That's not allowed anymore. And our building department is actually starting to enforce that. So you may say, well, somebody did that five years ago next door to me. But in the last two years, they're enforcing this maximum that they're not allowing that. And we're also not allowing people to pave over their whole front yard to make a whole parking lot in front. As long as what's interesting, though, is that homeowners don't necessarily know that they have to have a permit and what's allowed or not allowed. So if your neighbor just decides one day to pave over their front yard, as some I know did, they may not know that they need a building permit or permission from the building department. And the person who's paving their yard may not care about what's allowed or not allowed in Medford. So sometimes that happens before somebody tells them it's not allowed. We have a follow-up.
[Erika DeRoche]: I did have a follow-up question, but I actually forgot what it was. But basically, it's easier. I can see that it's, in a lot of ways, easier to provide those incentives to actual developers than to some of these smaller lots.
[Alicia Hunt]: I guess, same question. And I will say, when you talk about the 200 unit buildings, Those developers are easy to work with, and we work with the ones who have good reputations in the city of Medford. And it's smaller developers that some are wonderful and some are not wonderful, and it's really hard to just sort of treat everybody equally. It's a different situation.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, and just to quickly add on that because I see a lot of hands in both places but as we have been doing studies for building heights and street widths and etc for the, for the neighborhoods that we've been looking at and the other zoning. We have been talking about ways of showing how parking can fit onto sites with different restrictions and requirements and levels of zoning so we would probably continue to do that and try and figure out how those incentives would work and I see you've just remembered your question so real quick it was just.
[Erika DeRoche]: I'm sorry, I can't remember.
[Emily Innes]: I'm so I'm like, but you know what you're going to give me a great, very quick reminder for those of you who are in the room there are two boards in the back, one that says I have questions or comments or discussion about public parking, and one I have questions comments discussion about zoning. If on your way out, you think of anything or you have anything else, just park them back there. We have four people online and it's online terms next. I see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7 here. Can I just quickly flag? Yeah, exactly. We're getting kicked out at 8.45.
[Kit Collins]: Great. Let's keep it to sync so that we can hear from everybody. We're going to go to Zoom next.
[Alicia Hunt]: So we're going to go to Miranda Briseño on Zoom.
[Miranda Briseno]: Hi, I live on Taylor Street, the hillside area. 1st, I just want to plug that mascot actually has a lot of vehicle ownership data. Available to municipalities that breaks it down by vehicle type. Personal commercial also has a lot of data on through the cities and the average daily mileage. You know, all of the cars that I think would be really helpful. I just want to echo a lot of what's been said that. Induced demand exists and the reality is that the 38,000 cars that exist in Medford. If we eliminated parking minimums tonight would still be here tomorrow. Mine included. So I think removing those parking minimums. will still will support and encourage developers or smaller owners to not consider having parking, but it's still not going to change people who do need and want to build parking anyway, because again, there are almost 40,000 cars in this city. I mean, I would have loved to not buy a car a year ago. my insurance, my car payment monthly, you know, gas, everything. I mean, I bought a hybrid, I was excited about that. But, you know, like, I would have loved to not have that experience. But it just, I sat on it for about two months before I finally made the decision. I would have loved not to do it. But here I am anyway. So even as a car owner, as someone who has spent a lot of time with people with mobility limitations, the parking that people need will be there. And we can find ways to support those that don't need a car, don't want a car, can't afford a car, and are reliant on public transit. Thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: And I'm just going to say, Miranda, our staff will be reaching out to you for help in getting that data. If it wasn't clear, we know Miranda and she works for MassDOT.
[Kit Collins]: Great, I'm going to go to the 1st hand. I saw we're going to try really hard to get everybody.
[Haggerty]: And I live in West Medford just to piggyback on the gentleman's comment about if you have more spots, you're going to get more cars. Is that also the case? If you have more units in a town, will you get more cars?
[Emily Innes]: I can take an initial stab at that. Not necessarily. So it very much, I think, depends on where your units is. That was great English. Where your units are and also who they're pitched to for the units that are for, and this is where The transit policy comes in it's why Medford already has a reduction in parking requirements for units that are near the higher transit areas right near the green line. Maybe so much, not so much the commuter line as we're hearing so that's one of the things that we're going to be looking at, but not just looking at in terms of Medford again, we've been doing a deep dive. Paula has been doing a deep dive into strategies and recommendations and precedents from others. So that's what we want to bring back is it's easy for me to say that it's not always the case, but what we want to do is find out places that it has worked or that it hasn't worked. Back to my example of this community that did have good transit, but people still needed cars. So we are looking into that. It's a great question.
[Alicia Hunt]: Back to Zoom. The next person on Zoom is Steve Pompeo.
[Steven Pompeo]: Hi, thanks. I just have a couple of quick questions. One regarding alternative parking facilities. How does the zoning plan allow for alternative parking facilities in mixed-use zones, and in particular, the rebuild of the Governor's Ave Garage? The other question is, can you please discontinue the practice where the city council and the community development board are posting their hearing notices simultaneously and where the city council is posting their notice prior to even receiving their recommendations back from the community development board? I think that's one thing that's causing a lot of confusion because the city council is posting their public hearing And then the Community Development Board continues theirs, which means the City Council has to continue theirs, but none of those continuations get the same type of posting as the original meeting. And so it gets confusing as to which meeting people need to attend. And it just seems to be rushing, rushing the whole process. So if the City Council could just wait until they got their recommendations back from the Community Development Board to post their public hearings, I think that would help a lot. Thanks.
[Emily Innes]: Oh, sorry. Now I will speak to the alternative parking arrangements. Again, we don't have a specific recommendation for Medford yet, but the way I've seen it done in other communities is that you have the ability to count parking that is within a certain distance of your lot. In some cases, it might be you, the property owner, have another lot and you're putting the parking on lot, that's the off-site parking that Paolo's mentioned earlier. Another alternative parking arrangement, I think this is maybe where the speaker was getting to, is that there is a city garage that has a certain number of parking spaces available and you are allowed to lease those parking spaces from the city to put towards a development. So those are just two general options. I'm going to turn it over to... You want one very quickly? Okay, yeah, yeah.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Quickly. When it's being rented or leased, that has to be a minimum of years. In order to do the reduction, you need at least, what I have seen, it's at least 10 years, so just long times of service.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, that's an important point, Paola. Thank you. Do you want to talk to the garage and
[Alicia Hunt]: I don't think that we can talk about a specific project at this time. This is about zoning. But I'll just say that we had been advertising the two meetings together. In most situations, it was to reduce confusion, to make it clear that two different boards were meeting on the same topic. But with this continuing of the Community Development Board, I do acknowledge that that is causing more confusion. In the way this is working out previously in other situations, it was really to reduce the confusion. So should we get to the next question? And it saves a lot of money in advertising.
[William Navarre]: I just want to say, I think it's frankly unconscionable during a housing shortage and climate emergency that we are mandating any space in our city be set aside for car storage. If people need it, they can figure that out. We don't need the government telling us. The parking mandates are implicitly a subsidy to cars, the community that claims to care about walkability, about traffic jams, about traffic noise, about the climate crisis. The people who adore a drooling, drooling commute through our city would be right to think of every mandatory but underutilized parking space in Medford as a slap in their face. It'd be almost cruel to point out to them that our government mandated parking might be repurposed about urban housing that might relieve them of their Sisyphean commute. And frankly, it's insulting to me as a non-rival of a city policy that apparently thinks of me as temporarily embarrassed traffic. We're privileged to call Medford home, and I'm skipping most of this page, but I'm gonna say throughout this process, people have stood up and our city council has done a good job adopting a zoning code that's pro-housing, but it's just going to be pretty maps if we don't repeal or significantly reduce the parking mandates. We say we're for more housing, we have the maps that say we like lots of units, but it's not going to get built unless you repeal the parking minimums. I know it's very difficult when planners are asked, what should the parking minimum be? You can't say there shouldn't be parking minimums because you get fired because you're supposed to look up in the ITE trip generation manual and find what it says and look at the ridiculous chart. But that doesn't mean parking minimums are a good idea. And it doesn't mean that that's the best way forward. So I'm hoping that by the end of this calendar year, we see our city council take a vote on whether or not they're going to eliminate parking minimums. I understand that the planners are not ready to recommend that at this time, but to me, that's a political decision. It's a political decision when it comes to seeing that we center cars at every stage of the development process. Every time we see what might get built, we start with the parking minimum. Can we fit the parking? Okay, once we fit the parking, maybe then we can see how much apartments there are. That's not right. That's not consistent with our values. And I'll be able to recycle most of the speech next time because I get most of it. But thank you for hearing that.
[Alicia Hunt]: I'm not sure that we need to respond, but thank you for your, your comments. There were no questions. I've been trying to respond to questions. We're no questions in that. So should we go to one online and what? Oh, sorry. I didn't lower this hand. Steve is the one who just spoke. So the next one online is Megan Mars.
[Megan Marrs]: Hi there. I'm Megan Mars at 71 Clark Street. I'm just speaking now to show support for reducing parking mandates, not really just as a zoning issue, but really as a community issue. That's my biggest concern and issue with parking mandates. Because when we require every new building to include a certain number of parking spaces, we're really prioritizing cars over people. But walkable, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods are what truly foster connection. And that's where people want to live. People want to live in walkable communities that are alive and not just a sea of asphalt and cars. The more we design our spaces for cars, the more isolated we become. It means longer drives, wider roads that are really stressful and quite frightening to cross. and vast parking lots that separate us from chance encounters, sidewalk chats, and daily rituals that make a community actually feel alive. I know parking and cars are going to be inescapable for some people, but I don't feel like lowering parking mandates makes it impossible to have a car. Maybe a little more challenging, sure, but by no means impossible. I've lived in Somerville and Cambridge, areas where parking a car is certainly more challenging, but it's really always been doable if you need a car. I live in South Medford now, and yeah, sometimes you have to park a block or two away, but in my opinion, that's a really small price to pay. And the benefits we get from limiting car dependency really outweigh the drawbacks, in my opinion. I know we need accessible options for people who need them. I'm really completely sympathetic to that. But there will also always be many other individuals who will be perfectly fine walking a couple of blocks from where they park to their home. And reducing parking mandates will boost use of public transportation, which in turn provides more funding and support for public transport, which allows it to expand, become more frequent, and make it an even easier and more convenient option. I do have a car myself, but I really feel like the havoc that car-based infrastructure has inflicted on our communities really cannot be overstated. And I know some of us have really grown used to this system, and it can be hard to imagine a brighter future, but we can create something so much better and so much more alive where our cities are no longer forced to sacrifice community for car-based infrastructure. Thank you. I don't need a response.
[Alicia Hunt]: Sorry, I just needed the high five from.
[SPEAKER_10]: Hi, my name is Sneha Khan. Thank you so much for the presentation and for this opportunity to speak. I think that parking minimums affect modern people who are car owners or people who drive. And in we've had so many meetings so far and during this process and people have resoundingly come forward and said that they want more density and it's it's not possible to have more density if you have the same, or just slightly reduced. uh, parking minimums. So in that situation, how does your, how do your recommendations tie in or make possible the earlier recommendations of how the conversation has moved so far? And the other question that I have is that, uh, There are a lot of people who have spoken up so far, and I'm sure there will be more others later on voicing the opinion that they actually would prefer, myself included, would prefer to eliminate parking minimums, whether it be at certain neighbourhoods or citywide. So in that case, going back to your premise of how you started out, that you don't have a plan that you're proposing and you're open to suggestions, would you be willing to revise the view that you don't want to eliminate parking minimums, considering that there's a significant few of us, lot of us who want to do that. So those are my two questions.
[Emily Innes]: So Part of this was to hear the differences of opinion. We knew there would be differences of opinion, right? That's why we have public meetings is so we could hear them all. Our next step is to make that first presentation to the planning and permitting committee. For those of you who may have been following what we've done with the other components of the zoning we've talked about is that in that meeting, we bring forward what we've heard, what we recommend based on what we've heard. We have a conversation with planning and permitting We go away and sometimes we're doing more research. Sometimes we're coming back with an alternative recommendation. Sometimes they're telling us, this is what we want you to do, which of course, as city councilors is absolutely well within what they should be doing. As I said, we don't have any recommendations today. We probably will not have any recommendations on Wednesday because that's only two days away. But we are certainly trying to gather as much evidence as we can and much opinion as we can. to prevent, to be able to present a balanced range of what we've heard to the planning and permitting committee for our discussions with them. So thank you for that, that's very helpful to know.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: So, um, on the side of the eliminating the parking minimums, there is 1 issue that usually people do not see and is that cars are parking our private property. And so we eliminate and we put the pressure on on the street parking. There is a lot of public space that is given to private property. So deleting parking minimums have some issues that we also need to take into account. Because what we are right now, it's in a reality where we have a lot of car dependency. And that can be really moved in the future when we have alternative measures that we make sure that that doesn't happen. That is one explanation.
[Emily Innes]: I'll also add for those of you because clearly there's some people in the room who and both here and online are very interested in parking. If you haven't read the high cost of free parking, that would be a good one to look at. As we present additional information to the planning and permitting committee, we are providing all of the resources that Paola mentioned earlier. That would be great for some deep dives for people as well. Three more online?
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, and there's some more in the room. Are we back? Sorry, I'm not tracking. Are we on Zoom? Okay. Thank you. Sorry, I'm not tracking. We're going to go to Ken Garrow online.
[Ken Gareau]: All right. Thank you. I'm assuming you can hear me. Hopefully. So Ken Yarrow, I'm over in Lambert Street. I've spent the last couple of days actually kind of looking up parking minimums just to kind of educate myself more. Read an article on strong towns. There was a recent January Department of Transportation report that dropped about talking about parking reforms. One of the things is, I mean, first of all in general I'm kind of okay with at least minimizing parking minimums. I don't think they need to be quite as high as they currently are in our current zoning. One of the things I noticed in a lot of the case studies that kept popping up were cities and municipalities that had a little more granular control over their public transit. So like Chicago, New York, Seattle. Obviously, Medford does not have that. And that's one of my concerns is that we definitely have some disproportionate service imbalances. Right now I'm over in Glenwood. I am stoked for when the 96 and 101 bus gets redesigned. But right now I have a 101 bus that shows up once an hour, give or take. And so I just want to throw that out because I've said it before. But the other thing and Emily you, you made this comment, which I've heard about the book I just haven't gotten around to reading it. One of the big points that I think when you compare us to Somerville and Cambridge is able to parking permits right for your residential zones, especially areas. that are denser. And so like in my case, I have neighbors who have parking off street that I know park on street. And to that point of the high cost of parking, obviously, the parking department is not part of the zoning discussion. But I'm kind of hoping that there's something in that because part of the easy accessible transit manipulation And the lower frequency of kind of easy parking that can get offloaded by developers who do build in the absence of parking minimums kind of needs to be looked at. And so I'm kind of hoping the city is taking that in addition to the idea of kind of what is available for transport and kind of folding that in. Because right now I think we could delete parking minimums if we're talking about within that half mile radius among West Medford, Wellington, Tufts, Magoon Square. But yeah, that's kind of the biggest gist that makes me a little concerned that we don't offload and definitely let developers kind of run run over us just because we don't have kind of parking permit type structures in play like other surrounding areas do.
[Alicia Hunt]: Great, thank you, Ken. So we'll go to one in the room. I want to hear from the people more than I want to hear from the staff.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, Bill Douglas. So I guess some of the points that I was going to bring up have been hit recently, but I wanted to kind of reiterate them anyway. I wanted to agree with everything Paul said earlier, for one, so you can dig into the record for that. I won't repeat it all. Fundamentally, I think eliminating the parking minimum is a disaster. You turn us into Back Bay or the worst parts of Cambridge. I've got my opinion, you've got yours. But basically what you're doing, basically what you're doing is what you just said, which is you're basically handing public property to the developers, because that's where the cars are gonna go. And we're also talking about today, this is a 30 year plan, and everything I see indicates that we're intending to build more units. I cannot, fathom that we will not have more vehicles as a result of that. And we're gonna have more and more cars jamming up the streets. So to me, it makes more sense to kind of maintain some level of integrity with respect to off-street parking. We already have parts of the city that are more crowded on the street. This notion of, well, I don't mind walking a block or two. There aren't that many elderly people here, but for a lot of people in the city, that's a big deal. And people talking about other alternative transportation, not all parts of the city have. How many people took public transportation all the way here tonight? Not too many, I would guess. So there you have it. But anyway, I just think that eliminating parking minimums is going to turn out really bad.
[Alicia Hunt]: Thank you. Should we go to Andrew McRobert online?
[Andrew MacRobert]: Hi there, I just wanted to provide a couple anecdotal data points. 1 is that the, uh, in Wellington, the big strip of large scale retail with the massive parking lot, I'm talking about the area with, um, you know, ocean state job lot and Harbor Freight tools on 1 end stop and shop all the way down to Dave's hot chicken. That parking lot is never full and it's rarely even close to full. And I pass by it a lot. So I assume that there's so much parking as a result of parking minimums in that area. So yeah, one data point, I think that that should definitely be reduced. There's definitely way too much parking there. So much that they even put a Raising Cane's in recently. They took away a big swath of the parking lot, put in a new business, and there's still too much parking. Uh, another another point I wanted to make about that is that these parking minimums push buildings further apart because they require. More parking service parking and so when you have buildings pushed further apart, the distance to everything is further and it makes things less walkable and. reinforces car dependence and that's especially noteworthy right there because it's next to wellington station it's next to public transit and there's so much underdeveloped just surface parking that that should be you know used well for you know in some sort of transit oriented development The other thing that I wanted to mention, I'm not sure I have a point with this, but we're talking about induced demand. I think I'm a good example of this, or evaporated traffic demand. In Medford Square, that's about a mile and a half from me, and I'll walk if I have some time, I'm very comfortable biking during the day, but I'll drive if I want to go into Medford Square at night most of the time, because the street, how I get there, which is generally Riverside, or Salem Street, or a combination, is very, well, unfriendly if you're not in a motor vehicle, and so I just don't feel comfortable Going into its method on bike after darker when it's getting darker out. And so it, for example, uh, last month, I, I went to visit some friends we met up at Alta Cuba, and there happened to be a show at the Chevalier going on that night and. Uh, so everything was like, very, very full of cars and I'm, I'm just cruising through Medford square for like 10, 15 minutes. And then I eventually saw another car adding to traffic because there is not a safe walkable or bike option. And yeah, that's, uh, that's all I wanted to share. Thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: Great, thank you. Very it's it's very helpful. And honestly, that's why I didn't bike tonight was because I was going to have to bike home after after dark. So we hear you and clipper ship connector. Hopefully we'll make some of that route. We'll make it a lot longer, but it would make it a lot more pleasant. It will be opening in July kit.
[hLm7uOhMYTQ_SPEAKER_19]: Hi, my name is Donna Monica. I live in West Medford and I want to highlight. I was grateful to the gentleman I think from Douglas Road who brought up about elderly in the city. My mother has lived in the city for over 80 years and has been a homeowner for more than 60. She lives close to West Medford train station in a neighborhood of two family homes. All of those streets between West Medford Square and going out along Placeton Road are two family homes and they are jam-packed with cars every day. As my mother tries to get to appointments and she uses the door-to-door that the city provides, a great service, or maybe an Uber, the difficulty in getting out into their car, down the curb, out into the street to get into those vehicles is significant. I worry about, you know, removal of of allowing unrestricted parking to make that a more treacherous journey for elderly residents and for children in the neighborhoods. And I know we've talked about comparisons to Cambridge and Somerville, but even just a quick look at census data today, those are younger cities. In Medford, I believe it's more than 16% of residents are 65 or older. In Cambridge and Somerville, those numbers are closer to 10%. I wonder about the feasibility of doing an actual count in Medford, even if it's just for a point in time peek at how residents in the city, given the unique demographic makeup and transit makeup of the city, might inform our thinking about safe parking that's accessible for all and allows people to move safely about the neighborhoods. Thank you.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you very much for your comments. We were just remembering, if you saw us whispering, it's because we just were remembering that we did some maps roughly this time last year that looked at age by census within Medford. And yours is a good reminder that we should look back at that. So I just wanted to explain why we were whispering. It was in reaction to that. Thank you for your comments.
[Alicia Hunt]: Great. So we're going to go to one online. Diane, I'm going to ask you to unmute.
[SPEAKER_11]: Hello, thank you for taking my call. I'm hearing a lot about Cambridge and Somerville, and my comment pertains to Cambridge and Somerville. Some of the larger complexes in Cambridge and Somerville made it easier for people to travel by providing either zip car service at the locations of these complexes that have hundreds of units in one location, or maybe a shuttle bus to and from the nearest MBTA stations. So I'm not sure how that is going to impact what you're looking at in terms of parking, but I think it allows people an option to having to drive and um you know I'm not sure if how that's going to affect what you're looking to do with the numbers or um with with the you know your agenda with this whole uh, information gathering, but, um, I just think it would make it much easier for people to get around. And, um, you know, it's nice to sometimes not be able to drive. So I just wanted to share that comment. Thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: So I'll just quickly share that the city is doing some stuff around that. So one is when we talk about transportation demand management, this is something that we can do with the larger buildings. We are asking them, encouraging them to have spaces for zip cars. That is something that they do look at and we are working with. They are doing shuttle services to the Ts. and shared shuttle, that's the kind of thing that we can do with the larger and newer buildings. Some of them already have that. Rivers Edge has a shuttle that goes from their residential buildings down to the Wellington T-Stop. So some of that is happening. The City, as one of the speakers did allude to, has an on-demand service that the city pays for through our community development block grant. It's advertised to the senior center for seniors and people with disabilities where you sign up and the system will drive you to doctor's offices, doctor's appointments. in grocery shuttles and we are looking, we have a working group that's looking at how can we make this less expensive? Could we subsidize Lyft and Uber for some people rather than sending a shuttle van to their homes as needed? And we are doing a project with the MAPC right now looking at the potentials for fixed route service in Medford or more shuttles and stuff to try and help move people around without everybody having to use single use vehicles. So those are some of the studies that are going on. And we do continue to add bike lanes walkability. We are also funding some crosswalk improvement programs as stuff like that. So, those other things are happening as well, and we appreciate the feedback on it. And so now we're going to go to 1 in the room.
[Kaitlin Robinson]: Hi, I'm Caitlin Robinson. I'm really concerned with this idea that eliminating parking minimums would have to be a long term change that happens after we've made other modes better, when the reason that other modes are worse now are because of these kinds of policies that prioritize cars. We've had parking minimums for a long time. We still have a lot of complaints about parking and I think I think we need to go ahead, eliminate parking minimums, let people have choice, not everyone needs a parking space and it's pretty ridiculous to mandate that people who don't have a car have our infrastructure on their property when they don't want or need that. And it should be done in tandem with changes to public policy about how we regulate public spaces because it doesn't have to mean that eliminating parking minimums means all of a sudden it's just chaos and public spaces because we can set policy on that. Thank you.
[Roberta Cameron]: Thank you, Roberta Cameron. I live in the hillside area and I wanted to offer you ask for personal experiences. I've lived there for 30 years. And over that time, most of the time we've worked in locations where we can't take a car. Because there's no place to park at the other location, downtown Boston, the long wood area. Can Kendall square area? We can't take a car, but we've also gone through a period of time when 1 of us was working out on the 125, 128 area and. Getting from Route 2 to Mass Ave was half the commute. And so transportation demand management would be really helpful in both of those instances. My commute has, for a long time, involved walking a mile or a mile and a half to get to where I pick up public transportation. So it would be really helpful to have more options. And I would really like to see us accelerate giving everybody more options. My second point is that we have very limited land area in Medford. So as much as we provide to very land hogging cars, we don't have for green space. My neighbor paved their whole backyard so that they can park more cars. So, I would like to see us have incentives. To rely less on on creating new parking. On to rely more on using the existing pavement that we already have, especially on private property. So if we stop building more parking for every single lot, we give every other lot that already has enough parking or more than enough parking incentives to make that parking available for their neighbors. so i'd like to see more creating incentives for using the pavement that already exists in the city instead of creating more pavement and i think that reducing or eliminating parking minimums is going to make more choices and a more functional market driven system for allocating the space to whatever uses we want in the city, including driving as much as people want to, that a more market-driven approach will more efficiently get people to where they want to go using whatever mode of transportation they want to take.
[Alicia Hunt]: And then we have one more online. We're going to take two more in the room and then we'll take somebody on Zoom.
[Gaston Fiore]: So I think someone mentioned the market more like kind of free market approach. And the problem with this is that so it will eliminate parking minimums and it's creating an externality. And with this externality, the problem is that the decision maker, which in this case will be assuming there's no parking minimums, will be the developer. who decides whether to build something with parking or not, is not the one that is going to bear the cost if there's no parking. So I live two miles from rapid transit, and if you look around my neighbors, the average number of cars is definitely above two. I have one, so this doesn't apply to me, but I'm talking in general for everyone else. So clearly, if the developer comes and builds something without any parking where I live, then those cars, the people that move there are going to own Probably 1, 2, sometimes 3, I have a neighbor with 4. And that's perfectly fine, by the way. So I think it's perfectly fine if my neighbor decides to pave their backyard, so they want to park their cars there. Who am I to say, no, don't do that. those cars are going to go to the street. So that's where I'm kind of confused when you say like car management is not part of the discussion. To me, car management should be an intrinsic part of the discussion because those cars now are going to end up on the streets. And we might have existing residents that don't have enough parking on their lots that are using the streets now. And now because there's no off street parking because the developer doesn't bear the costs, Now that those spots might become taken and now for existing residents becomes much harder now to park their car, which means that our quality of life, the quality of life of existing residents goes down. And then also when new people come and buy a house, they don't pay too much attention to like, oh, I don't have parking off street, but I'm gonna find somewhere on the road. So the way to deal with this is that we actually need a car management strategy. And we need to be able, if we're going to go with this route of eliminating parking minimums, then I think we need to make sure that the cost of buying something without off-street parking, which is totally fine as people have mentioned, we should give the customer the choice. I want to buy something with parking or I want to buy something without parking. But if they buy something without parking, it should be very clear what cost or not. they are going to take. And with the current management structure, for example, we could have block-level permit quotas where if you get assigned a permit per dwelling, But it's capped by whatever curb capacity we have in that area. I looked this up. This is actually implemented in Portland. There's like a little zone in Portland that has it in Toronto, the same thing. And just to let you know, though, demand is over 140% supply, which means that there's a wait list. There's people that are trying to get parking and they cannot. Some people might be trying to sell new residence. Some existing resident might want to buy a new car and then there's no place to park it and they cannot buy it because they will have to park it who knows where. So as long as the cost is bear, you know, it's bear born whatever it is. As long as residents bear the costs, of their decision, right? So I'm gonna buy this house, this house doesn't have off street parking, and there's no parking availability on the corpse, so I will have to leave without a car, and they're willing to do that choice, then I think that's a free market approach. But if we don't have that restriction, it's a free for all, in terms of funding on-street parking, then I think that is chaos. And moreover, for us existing residents, we're going to be paying the price primarily, because as I said, we're going to have to park blocks away from our house, when now it's like we can park right in front of it. And I don't think it's fair. So I look forward to the car management approach discussion, which I think should be an intrinsic part of this discussion. Thank you.
[Emily Innes]: We would love to talk with you about it. We have one minute before we're getting kicked out. So we have one more person online and one more person in the room. All right, let's do online first. And then just so we end with somebody in the room, if that's okay. So you will be our last speaker in the room. We'll do the last speaker online. And then we will thank you all.
[Alicia Hunt]: And so Jared Nussbaum, I'm going to unmute you.
[Jared Nussbaum]: Thank you. So I'm Jared. I live in West Medford in a duplex that has off-street parking. I look specifically for a place with off-street parking and was willing to pay more for it. I think it's a good amenity, but I don't think parking minimums should be the way that they're created. It should be demand-based. And so I think you should eliminate parking minimums and to deal with on-street parking problems that may arise from that, that should be the car management system, like permitting, not parking minimums. Thank you.
[Stephanie Geuns-Meyer]: Stephanie Gernsmeier, 54, Whitney Road, walk score 42, but 24 years without a car. I don't think we're that weird, but at any rate, You know, I'm all for finding ways to actually attract more people who are car free. But I'm also sympathetic to the whole, you know, I do think zoning and project and parking management should go together. What I'm wondering about is like, cul-de-sac, Tempe, Arizona. So how do they do it? How do they, I mean, it's way larger than anything we do here, but there must be ways that you actually can build, you know, units, housing development, where there is zero parking, where nobody there is even allowed to own a car, and therefore you're not putting the pressure on the neighbors. You're actually making life better for the people who do. Can we do that?
[Emily Innes]: I think that's a question we can't answer tonight, but it's certainly a question that we can continue to consider as we move forward. We're getting ready to leave. I want to thank everybody. If you have time to write something on your way out, we would really appreciate that. Next stop planning and permitting on Wednesday. Really appreciate for online and the people in the room and to the Bedford Library for giving us this space. Thank you so much.
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