Experts agree: Enough Space Already Dedicated to Cars in Downtown Homewood

At a recent Homewood City Council meeting, the results of a recent downtown traffic study were presented:

There are 824 city-owned spaces and 1,212 private spaces that the RPC studied.

Their results, based on traffic counts and video monitoring, showed that city spaces averaged about 75 percent full and private spaces about 51 percent occupied. Parking on 18th Street was almost always 100 percent occupied during the 10 a.m.-4 p.m. hours. Ninety percent of the surface lot behind city hall was occupied during that time, while the underground garage’s 399 sports were only 40 percent occupied during the day.

Puckett said the two-hour parking time limit is rarely enforced and some cars will occupy spaces all day long.

Additionally, for resolution:

Recommended ticketing and enforcement of the two-hour time limit and pursuing the possibility of having businesses validate parking as a way to discourage long-term parking.

For more ideas on why this is important, check out Rebalancing Homewood’s Automobile — Retail — Pedestrian Relationship. In that write up, we presented the ground figure map which shows the ridiculous amount of land dedicated to automobiles in downtown Homewood.