On nearly every new post I publish, I get some variation of the same comment: “What about parking?” Many of these commenters will acknowledge that all of the official studies of Kirkwood’s parking have found no shortage of available parking but insist that their own informal experiences prove otherwise. Go to Downtown Kirkwood on any Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night, and it’s hard not to believe them. Finding a spot at Billy G’s is already difficult, and Four Hands hasn’t even opened up yet, The James is just now leasing up, and the Kirkwood Apartments and The Aria are just beginning construction.
I think it’s fundamentally unproductive to try and argue with these lived experiences. In politics, perception is reality, so if people want our elected officials to make parking easier, they should try and make parking easier, not shame people for not wanting to walk from a parking spot that may or may not be available a couple of blocks over.
So what I want to do today is offer a solution that will make parking more easily available, cut taxes, and benefit small businesses in the process. That’s a lot to promise, but in return, I’m going to ask you to trust the means I’m about to recommend for getting there. I think the best way to build that trust is by answering some of your most pressing questions. First up: How did we get into this mess to begin with?
Why do we have a parking shortage?
This fundamental question has a pretty fundamental answer: Kirkwood doesn’t have enough parking because we’re currently giving away a valuable asset for free. And if you think about, anytime you give away something that’s valuable for $0, you’re always going to have a shortage of that thing.
To demonstrate this phenomenon, I recently wrote a piece looking at the hypothetical question, “What if we made housing in Kirkwood free?” The conclusion of that piece was that it would be entirely unworkable as a public policy. Some people who didn’t actually need their own house would take one because it was free. Then, as a result, some people who really did need a house and were willing to pay a premium to get one wouldn’t be able to find one. The city of course could try to build more houses, but as long as they were giving them away for free, there’d never be enough. Houses are valuable, so at a price of $0 people would keep wanting more and more, and the city would spend a ton of money only to leave people pissed every time all the newly constructed homes got scooped up and we found ourselves back shortage again.
The same holds true of parking. Parking in Downtown Kirkwood is useful, but we give it away for free. A lucky few people get a spot, and everyone else is left to circle the block in frustration. The city could try to build more, but it would costs us a lot of money, both to construct the garage, and then maintain it thereafter. Kirkwood can’t even afford a proper community center that at least would be able to return some revenue to the city in the form of user fees, so the idea that Kirkwood could drop a few million on a parking garage that would actively lose the city money each year in maintenance costs doesn’t make a lot of financial sense. Parking garages are also famously sketchy (movies constantly show crimes happening in dimly lit parking garages for a reason), almost invariably ugly (would you rather walk along shop and restaurant-filled streets at night in Downtown Kirkwood or a concrete parking garage?), and they crowd traffic onto a single street destroying any lingering quaintness (imagine hundreds of cars pouring in and out of a single garage next to PJs all night long), plus parking garages don’t get you very close to where you actually want to be (Is a person supposed to carry a bag of mulch over their shoulder from OK Hatchery all the way to a garage next to PJs? That’s the same problem we have right now!). In short, a parking garage would blow a hole in the city’s budget and would probably make downtown Kirkwood less quaint, without accomplishing much in terms of convenience.
So how do we solve that shortage?
The solution, then, is to treat parking as if it were any other commodity people want and assign it a price higher than $0. Ideally, that price should be one that ensures there are always one or two parking spots available on any given block at all times. If there are more than one or two parking spots available on a block (i.e. we’re not selling any of our inventory), then the price is too high, and it needs to be lowered. If there are fewer than one or two spots available on a block, then the price is too low and needs to be raised.
How will we know if the price needs to go up or down?
Okay, so say we go with my idea, how is Kirkwood supposed to even price parking accurately enough to ensure that we have one or two spots available on any given block? Well, a few years back, Kirkwood did something pretty amazing that not many people know about. We got a Chesterfield-based company called Fybr to install sensors under every street parking space in Downtown Kirkwood, and we got them to do it for free (Fybr wanted to have a proof-of-concept that they could point to for marketing purposes).
Those sensors tell you exactly which spaces are available and where (check out the “Park Kirkwood” app to see the sensors in action), but their main commercial appeal is they allow cities to utilize “demand pricing,” where the price for parking goes up when there aren’t many spots available and down when there are lots of spots available. Kirkwood hasn’t tapped into these capabilities yet, but we already have the hardware installed, so it would be incredibly low cost to the city.
Won’t charging for parking kill business in downtown?
Many people have told me that if we charge for parking, people will stop coming to Downtown Kirkwood and businesses will flee. In fact, apparently Kirkwood had metered parking until the 80’s (check out the cover picture of this piece!) but they were yanked out out of fear that they were hurting small businesses. This is a reasonable concern, but it’s rendered obsolete by demand-based pricing. Dynamic demand-based pricing means that if people stop coming to Downtown Kirkwood for some reason, the price would automatically drop (all the way back to $0 if demand was low enough) until people started filling the spots again.
Prices would be very low (or $0 depending on demand) on most weekday mornings for example, but then would likely go back up on weekend nights when things got crowded to ensure that there are always one or two spots available on every block. Further, ensuring some spots are always available should actually help businesses, as customers would always be able to find a nearby parking spot. Then once those customers finished their business, the running meter would incentivize them to get out of there and make room for new customers to do the same (think of how many more tables restaurants could turn with this simple nudge and how many more tips waiters would recieve).
What would we do with the revenue generated?
The short answer is that I think we should cut taxes. There’s an established school of thought (led by the foremost expert on public parking, Professor Donald Shoup) that says you’ll never convince drivers that they should have to pay for parking, and instead you should venture to convince business owners themselves. As part of that strategy, Shoup insists that the revenue gained from metered parking should be reinvested in a way that benefits the businesses located in the neighborhood where the parking revenue is generated. The idea being that by spending the money on things like upgraded sidewalks or street trees or benches or wayfinding maps, Downtown Kirkwood would be a nicer place to visit and thus more people would come and the businesses would get more customers, all of which would cause them to be more supportive of implementing the paid parking in the first place.
The Downtown Kirkwood Special Business District (SBD) strikes me as the ideal vehicle for implementing such a program. The SBD collects property taxes from all the commercial property owners in the district and charges money for business licenses to the businesses themselves, and in exchange, they pursue activities, like buying advertisements or planting flowers, or hosting special events that attract customers to Downtown Kirkwood and those businesses.
Pooling resources to pursue activities that benefit everyone makes sense, but these property taxes and business licenses also enacts costs that businesses must recoup in order to be profitable. One way they do this is by passing along these costs to consumers in the form of higher prices. If we replaced the SBD’s tax and license revenue with the revenue gained from paid parking, we could expect both Kirkwood’s small businesses and consumers to benefit.
As you can see above though, the property taxes and business license revenue the SBD collects though only amount to roughly $245,000 a year though, and I think it’s reasonable to expect that paid parking could bring in significantly more annual revenue than that. Clayton’s paid parking generates $2.1 million for the city annually. Obviously there’s a lot higher demand for parking in Clayton than there is in Kirkwood, but Clayton also charges a flat rate of $1.50 per hour, and I’d expect the more efficient dynamic pricing to compensate for at least some of that higher baseline of demand.
With that efficiency in mind, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that paid parking in Downtown Kirkwood could bring in ~$1 million per year, a little less than half of what Clayton generates. After you subtract out the $245k that would go to the SBD to replace their property and business license revenue we’d be replacing, that would leave us with about $750k a year to dedicate to some other use.
So what else would we spend the remaining money on?
My favorite idea for what to do with the rest of the money is to bookmark it for projects that get people to Downtown Kirkwood via other modes of transit like walking, biking, or taking the bus. In theory, this helps improve overall access to Downtown Kirkwood because it wound ensure parking capacity is no longer the binding constraint on how many customers can come to Downtown Kirkwood on any given day, which means more revenue for businesses and more tax revenue for the city.
My favorite idea for how to do this is a project I’ve dubbed “The Frisco Trail.” The basic idea would be to fund a stronger multi-modal connection between Downtown Kirkwood and Downtown Webster via Adams and Lockwood. I could imagine such a project taking a couple of different forms. You could either do a Grant’s Trail-like multi-use path, or more creatively the fund could be used to help stand up a shuttle bus route in between Downtown Kirkwood and Downtown Webster on busy summer weekends, with Kirkwood, Glendale, and Webster all contributing to the project.
More basically though, if you used these funds for more basic road improvements in and around Downtown Kirkwood and included features like protected bike lanes and raised crosswalks in and around Downtown Kirkwood, we could reduce our reliance on higher taxes to achieve the funding (as is being proposed with the city-wide Transit Development District sales tax increase being put to voters this fall).
The Bottom Line
There’s an old proverb that Communism would manage to generate a shortage of sand in the Sahara. When a resource is valuable, but priced as if it’s not (like free parking), it’s really hard for central planners to figure out a way to either make enough of that resource or distribute it fairly. The good news is that about 250 years ago, capitalism was invented as a way to get around this problem. All of a sudden valuable resources were priced, that price constantly adjusted based on supply and demand, and the valuable resources started flowing to the people and places where they were most useful and productive. That simple invention of assigning things a market price made the world an infinitely more prosperous place than it had ever been at any point in the 300,000 years that had proceeded it. I’m not saying that pricing our parking will unlock quite the same level of economic wellbeing, but I am saying that at the very least it could mean lower taxes and an easier job finding a parking spot outside of Billy G’s on a Friday night.
Very well written, as usual. I especially agree with your starting premise: if people feel that parking is an issue, then it should be taken seriously regardless of what the “experts” say. In my opinion, part of the problem stems from Kirkwood catering primarily to the wealthy, who live close enough to downtown to walk. They cannot recognize the parking problem, because it does not occur to them that not everyone can afford to live just down the street. Kirkwood is a much broader place than just downtown, however.
The city council’s curt, unreflective, and premature rejection of St. Peter’s offer to provide additional parking by converting the street was fueled at least in part by ornery rich folk who did not like the idea of gaining the slightest inconvenience in exchange for helping the community as a whole. (I do not mean to malign everyone who opposed the project, but only some vocal persons who voiced some highly inconsistent arguments on social media. There is a major difference between opposing something for intelligent reasons and opposing something out of mere emotion and reactivity.)
At the very least, I can say from personal experience that I am often reluctant to try downtown businesses because I don’t want to have to figure out where to park. In fact, the mobility difficulties of one of my kids qualify us for handicap parking, but there is exactly one handicap spot near Billy G’s. Last year we were bringing our kids to the ballet studio near there and we could never manage to find that one spot open. We often had to park in St. Peter’s and cross the street, which was quite a difficult and precarious affair in the evening, in the cold, with a mobility-limited child and two other toddlers in tow. I seriously think that fixing our parking problems would increase the profitability of local businesses. Yet to do that, we need to stop trading parking spots for expensive condominiums! We need to stop making downtown a playground for the rich and find ways to make it accessible for all Kirkwoodians and other visitors from the county.
Your arguments about charging for parking make good, logical sense. I would be more skeptical, but your point about the sensor hardware already existing really makes this seem like common sense. However, we should consider also ways to improve parking for the disabled and for low-income families. This likely means that we need to dedicate more spots for the disabled and we may need to provide more parking spaces on the whole, even though you are correct that we could do better with the spaces that we have.
Keep up the good work!
Thank you, Michael! This is incredibly helpful. I actually had a couple of other people email me to raise the issue of a lack of handicap spots in Downtown as well, so I’m absolutely going to look into that issue for a future piece. I also don’t know if it makes sense to charge for parking on handicap spots. Presumably, people using those spots don’t really have a lot of options for alternate transit methods, so does it make sense to try and curb their driving? At the same time, if there’s more demand for these spots than supply, maybe the same pricing principle holds. Do you know if other places with metered parking usually charge for these spots, in your experience? Thanks again for all the thoughts!
How long was the old 56 bus route through Kirkwood downtown? Less than 10 miles? We could probably have 12 minute frequency for less than $2mil per year, that would be an attractive alternative to driving (and parking) for Kirkwood and WG residents, and I imagine Metro would bear a portion of the cost. Or you could have multiple local (shorter) routes within Kirkwood.
The full route of the old #56 was 8 miles long, the Kirkwood portion of the route was like 3.3 miles of that. It was cut because of low ridership, but I think 1) Downtown Kirkwood has a lot more density and walkability than it did even a short while ago, and 2) You could probably save some of the cost by truncating the Meramec/Couch/Woodbine portion of the route. Running from Downtown Kirkwood through Downtown Webster and on to the Shrewsbury Metrolink stop would be amazing for Kirkwood if we could get MetroLink on board (either by helping to subsidize it or by increasing density further or building infrastructure that helped boost ridership like a dedicated bus lane/shelters). Otherwise I think the DTK -> DTW/Gazebo Park portion of the route might be worth pursuing on our own. Paradoxically I think the financials would be better if Metro helped run it (they have the experience/economies of scale) but it would probably be much more politically popular if we tried to stand up our own program (people would probably ride a Kirkwood/Webster shuttle bus who would never in a million years ride a metro bus). This is probably a full article in and of itself, so I’ll see what I can do!
I think you’re cutting the majority of the Kirkwood portion of the route if you start at DTK instead of Meramec; I would think Meramec students and Aberdeen Heights residents could potentially be a fair portion of ridership, not to mention any commercial or mixed-use redevelopment that eventually happens on Woodbine. If you’re trying to replace parking downtown then the route should hit the residential areas. The portion of the route east of DTK is also more densely populated than the western portion, I think.
Regarding low ridership, note the old route only ran (as I recall) once every 60 minutes.
Also, the $2m I calculated is just operating expenses, not offset by fares. I think it would make sense to not charge ridership, at least for Kirkwood boardings, if possible. I remember office workers in MetroLink riding it to lunch more frequently when it was free to board during lunch hours within the city. I would strongly prefer a bus that was part of the Metro system, because the bus becomes much more valuable if it is interoperable with the entire Metro network. Also there might be way more capital expenses if Kirkwood had to maintain its own admin, maintenance shed and so on.
Reverse where I said east and west in that comment, obviously.
I think you’re right that ideally it should be a Metro bus and if it is a metro bus, it should go all the way to Meramec. I think if it’s a metro bus though, it will have to charge a fare. Alternatively, if Kirkwood/Glendale/Webster were to try to stand up their own shuttle bus, I think you’re probably right that admin/insurance is probably incredibly cost-prohibitive, especially since the route would be fare-free (though partially funded by parking revenue). In that world, you have to look to cut costs wherever you can which probably means 1) focusing on a tight geography with highest density (Downtown Kirkwood-Gazebo Park) 2) A limited schedule likely only running on weekends from the spring to the fall. 3) The route is aprox a ~26 min drive roundtrip so if you were going to try and pull it off with just one bus, you’re probably looking at ~35 min frequency at best (which we’d really need to get down to 30 min for clock-face scheduling if we wanted people to actually take the thing) which would require additional infrastructure improvements. I’m not sure if all that would be worth the financial investment (writing all of this out has convinced me Metro is probably the only viable way), but I am confident that people would at least like a locally ran shuttle and be politically supportive of it, even if it doesn’t quite make sense on the merits
Free housing for cars but not for people… sometimes I wonder if the Illuminati are Transformers.
Rather than more parking in downtown Kirkwood, perhaps the City could put in a commuter parking lot on North Kirkwood Road and purchase the Loop Trolley to shuttle passengers for free to downtown and back. There is already a plethora of empty lot space just south of Manchester.
LOL
I live just over the bridge on Clay Ave. I rarely see the parallel spaces along Clay full, and certainly not past Monroe street. Or the parking lot across from the Police Station after 6PM Also, I don’t think the free Garage behind The Minfig Store on Kirkwood Blvd has ever filled up.
Us locals are used to walking across the tracks or the bridge, including wheelchairs. But visitors don’t.