By Sam Haas, news correspondent
The Boston Transportation Department (BTD)’s new commissioner, Gina Fiandaca, is considering changes to parking permit rules in an attempt to facilitate easier on-street parking in the city, changes Northeastern students say can’t come soon enough.
“It’s terrible,” Dave MacKnight, a student in the project management master’s program, said of city parking. “It’s always been a hassle. It’s a real estate problem; there’s just no place to put people.”
In response to residents’ parking concerns, Fiandaca, who has served as interim deputy transportation commissioner since last May and whom Walsh named as Boston’s new transportation commissioner in January, pledged in a Jan. 26 Boston Globe article to examine the process by which she and her staff allocate parking passes. Under the current system, residents can receive one free permit for each car they own.
“Due to the increasing number of active permits, BTD will be reviewing the Resident Parking Program to determine if adjusting components of the program at this time would relieve the parking crunch that residents are experiencing,” BTD Public Affairs Coordinator Tracey Ganiatsos said in an email to the News.
According to the Globe, there are 94,000 permitted vehicles in Boston as of January, which far outstrips the availability of spaces. This imbalance can make finding a parking spot nearly impossible in some neighborhoods.
“It’s just a supply and demand thing,” George Thrush, director of Northeastern’s School of Architecture and a professor in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, said. “Everybody feels they should have the right to park for free in front of their house, but there are only so many spaces.”
According to Thrush, the shortage is stark in the wealthier areas of Boston, including Charleston, Back Bay, the South End and most of downtown.
“It’s a complex problem because places that are economically successful attract more people and more cars,” Thrush said. “In poorer neighborhoods, there’s generally lower car ownership and this isn’t as much of an issue.”
The particular difficulty of parking downtown may also be due to the permit system’s history.
“For many years, the purpose of Boston’s Resident Parking Program was to deter Downtown Boston commuters from parking all day on nearby residential streets,” Ganiatsos said.
By contrast, parking closer to campus can be different.
“It’s pretty easy on Mission Hill this time of year,” senior nursing student Rachelle Arcuri said. Arcuri has never registered for a permit because her condo has a garage. “There are spots on Parker Hill Avenue.”
Arcuri added that parking on the street is made more difficult by monthly street cleaning during the spring and summer and by time limitations, both of which would be more pressing if she didn’t have a garage.
There are a few possible changes to Boston’s permit system Fiandaca could decide to implement.
One option is making residents pay for permits. A fee would help balance the incentive free parking gives drivers to circle looking for an unmetered space.
“Having on-street parking cost more like what it does to park in parking garages would change everything,” Thrush said. “If all spaces are part of the parking supply because they’re similarly priced, people would stop leaving paid spaces and garages open, especially at night.”
Senior nursing major Katie Mezic believes that paying for permits makes sense.
“A fee would be a deterrent,” Mezic said. “People would only pay for what they really needed.”
Another approach would be to cap the number of permits each household can hold at once, thereby decreasing the total number of permits and spreading the parking wealth out. That idea might be the most feasible for Fiandaca and other city officials seeking a fix to Boston residents’ parking woes, according to Thrush.
“The easiest political solution would be to set some maximum number of permits, say two, per household,” Thrush said.
In the past, the city has attempted to convince residents to use bikes and public transportation rather than tinker with the permit system, which may make systematic changes hard to sell to the public.
“You have to frame it to appeal to a large number of people while still making parking incrementally more available,” Thrush said.
In any case, residents will have to wait for Fiandaca’s review to conclude before learning what, if any, impact they will feel.
“Really, the issue is how car-dependent we are,” Thrush said. “This is part of the larger conversation of cities wanting to be more efficient and more connected without having more congestion. It’s happening in cities around the world.”
Photo by Scotty Schenck
