When 8th Street and 9th Street are both one-way,
how much parking is lost?

Here is the drawing from the draft plan, showing how 8th Street and 9th Street might be.

The outline of a Ford F-150 has been added. The car in the image shown is about 68″ wide, which is the width of a pretty small car. As examples, the sub-compact Honda Fit is 67″, a Honda CRV or a Subaru Outback is 73″, a Toyota Corolla is 70″. The standard Ford F-150 is 80″ wide for the body and 96″ including the mirrors.

I don’t think an 11-foot traffic lane is wide enough for drivers to back into from an angled parking spot — it is less than standard practices.  The depiction shown below has a 6-foot sidewalk on one side and a 10-foot sidewalk on the other.  Together with the 7-foot bike lane and the only-11-foot traffic lane, it adds up to 55 feet — five feet wider than the 50-foot right of way. In theory the 10-foot sidewalk on the left could come out of someone’s parcel with a building setback; in reality 8th and 9th Streets are lined with existing buildings and a greater setback really isn’t possible.

So count on the sidewalk on the left side — the parking side — being reduced to 6 feet wide, and the bike lane being 6 feet instead what’s shown.  But if the traffic lane has to be increased to 13 or 14 feet so that people can pack out of the angled spots, then what?  We reduce the  size of the 3-foot separator?  That’s not a good solution.

What happens with angled parking?

With angled parking on one side only, we go from about 20 spaces to 13 spaces — a loss of 35% of our parking.

According to accepted figures for standard parallel and angled parking, a 9’ angled parking stall requires 12.7 feet of road length, while parallel parking requires a minimum of 18 feet.  As an example, over a 200-foot uninterrupted distance, there will be with angled parking on one side of the street, there will be 16 spaces. Take away some at the ends for safety, and you have 13, as shown here.  With parallel parking there would be 11 spaces in 200 feet (or, more realistically, 10) and so there’d be 20 spaces for parking on both sides of the street. 
With angled parking on one side only, we go from about 20 spaces to 13 spaces — a loss of 35% of our parking.

Ending up with the same amount of parking? 

 

It simply isn’t true.

There are many advantages to angled parking, but if going from parallel parking on two sides and changing to angled parking on one side, very much parking is lost.  The December draft Gateway plan introductory video states:

“So by taking all the parking that was formally or is currently parallel parking on both sides and putting it all on one side you end up with the same amount of parking generally.”

See the video on this website here.  The Street Parking portion is at 53:48 in the video.

Ending up with the same amount of parking? 

It simply isn’t true.

Here are aerial images of 8th and 9th Streets, from Google Earth. 

Look at the existing parking on 8th Street and 9th Street. If the parking is eliminated on one side of the street, what does that do to the business community?
Consider the image below.  The yellow line shows the reduction in street parking.